Howard Dean doesn’t believe in luck, nor does he leave matters to chance.

“My favorite quote is from Louis Pasteur: Chance favors the prepared mind,” Dean said in an interview Monday while campaigning in John McCain’s home state of Arizona.

Dean envisioned the Democratic Party building a new base in solidly Republican strongholds, and should Barack Obama win the presidency and Democrats expand their margins in Congress on Tuesday, as most polls predict, Dean will walk away from this election as one of the unsung heroes.

But Dean, the former Vermont governor, took control of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2005 amid cries that he would embarrass the party — and from there, built the party’s political machine.

Dean relied on his own brand of grassroots organization, ventured into rural districts that typically vote Republican and recycled the language of empowerment from his failed presidential campaign, which has become the template for Obama’s historic run for the White House.

All the while, Dean has kept out of the media spotlight, something Democratic leaders suggested after Republicans pounced on a few impolitic comments, such as claiming that a lot of Republicans “have never made an honest living in their lives.”

Even Dean’s one-time opponents give him credit.

“I think it’s partial vindication,” said Harold Ickes, a longtime ally of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) who opposed Dean for the DNC chairmanship. “There are special circumstances in each state. In Alaska, who would have predicted the conviction of Sen. [Ted] Stevens [R]?”

But Dean’s farsighted preparations put Democrats in the position to benefit if Republicans faltered, as Stevens did in Alaska, and his vision of challenging in far-flung Republican strongholds has borne results.

Democratic candidates stand a chance of capturing the Senate seat in Mississippi, and polls show Obama within striking distance of winning Indiana and North Carolina.

Dean paid for national-party staff in all 50 states and developed a single voter database for every Democratic candidate to use in 47 states.

Democratic Party officials are convinced this enabled Obama to build a strong grassroots operation in Republican strongholds, such as Idaho, Nebraska and North Dakota, that pushed him to victory over Clinton in the primary.

The database also helped Obama assemble an unprecedented field operation in other conservative-leaning states such as North Carolina, Virginia and Missouri, throwing McCain on the defensive.

While Republicans had a national voter database for years, Democrats relied on a patchwork of state voter files that were difficult to use.

A DNC official said it would have been difficult for Obama to effectively move his legion of young campaign workers from state to state if they had to wrestle with the quirks of a different voter file in each state.

“He wouldn’t have been able to build the huge grassroots operation that he did,” the official said.

But even while Dean kept his head low and his nose to the grindstone, he still drew fire from Democrats on the Hill.

Dean’s emphasis on investing resources in states where Democrats had a paltry record of success drew the scorn of former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who clashed bitterly with Dean in 2005 over the DNC’s spending strategy.

At one point, Emanuel stormed out of a meeting with Dean while unleashing a string of expletives. Emanuel wanted Dean to save more money for television ads to help Democratic House candidates later in the cycle.

James Carville, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, argued that Democrats could have captured 40 House seats in 2006 if Dean had listened to Emanuel.

Democrats have since won special elections in solidly Republican districts in Louisiana and Mississippi and are now poised to capture at least 15 more seats, according to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

“He was reviled, and this is his ultimate triumph over Rahm Emanuel, who was one of the most vocal opponents of the 50-state strategy,” said Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University professor who specializes in politics.

The idea for the 50-state strategy germinated in 2004, when Dean traveled off the beaten campaign path and discovered how dilapidated his party had become in the South and the West.

“The Mississippi Democratic Party had only one person on staff and the person was part-time,” said Tom McMahon, Dean’s 2004 deputy campaign manager, who now serves as executive director at the DNC. “We were shocked. Texas had only one Hispanic person working for the state party, and it was an administrative task.”

Dean met with state chairmen at the 2004 Democratic National Convention who felt left out because their states were not targeted by Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) presidential campaign or the national party, said McMahon.

Dean became more convinced of his strategy after Kerry’s campaign aides told him after the election that the weakness of the party infrastructure was a major reason for the loss to President Bush, as was the DNC’s hoarding of cash until the final weeks of the campaign, instead of spreading it around the country.

Dean told The Hill the DNC’s low cash on hand compared to the Republican National Committee during the past four years has created the wrong impression that he hasn’t focused on fundraising. (For example, the Republican Party had nearly 10 times more cash on hand than the DNC at the end of April.)

“We spent it, much to the chagrin of some of the people in Washington who wanted to get their hands on it,” said Dean.