Consider this a pre-post, to be subbed out, as we say in the newspaper biz (or did when there was a newspaper biz) later in the day when we all know who won the Democratic primary for governor.

Assuming that, later in the day, we all know who won the Democratic primary for governor.

We certainly did not know at midnight, when men of a certain age should take themselves to bed, Peter Shumlin was 32 votes ahead of Doug Racine and a whopping 652 votes ahead of Deb Markowitz, with 37 precincts left to report.

(Early morning update: Shumlin ahead of Racine by 121 with 28 precincts still to report)

Which precincts? Where were they?

Who knew?

Well, perhaps someone did, but if so none of the local television stations or newspaper web sites bothered to find out and let the rest of us know, knowledge that could have provided at least a clue as to who was likely to end up ahead. A journalistic failure shared by all.

But WVNY-TV (Channel 7) and WPTZ-TV (Channel 5) had their very own failures. Channel 7 kept leaving one of the Democratic leaders out of its “crawl” with the results, while Channel 5’s just reported percentages. Hello Channel Five: When three candidates have 25 percent, you really ought to give the actual numbers.

Speaking of which, those numbers were kind of impressive. Remember (because you only have to remember the last few days) when all the wise guy political experts (yes, including this one) were predicting that only 40,000 Democrats, at most, were likely to vote?

Well, by midnight, more than 60,00 votes had been counted. It looked as though the total might top 65,000 (though, again, not knowing which precincts had not reported, they could all be small towns with only a hundred or so votes each). An August primary may not be such a bad idea after all

Still, the wise guy political experts and the conventional wisdom weren’t entirely wrong. Susan Bartlett did finish a poor fifth, and Matt Dunne, despite what seemed to be (and maybe was) a late surge, ended up a respectable but not close fourth. It was a three-way race after all.

This nail-biter was not what the Democrats wanted. A clear winner would have been stronger going against Brian Dubie in November. If the winner had been several points and several thousand votes ahead, the win would have seemed more impressive, the losers would have found it easier accept the results.

But that’s one way politics is like life. You don’t always get what you want. Then you have to make the best of what you get.

And what the Democrats got isn’t so bad. They got attention. They put on a good show, for several weeks before Primary Day, and it isn’t over yet. Yes, the close call of the two near-winners may convince some of their supporters to do some tooth-gnashing and grumbling over might-have-beens.

But probably not many. It was a civil campaign, with all five candidates – and almost every Democrat in the state – agreeing that any one of them would be acceptable. Almost no one fell in love with any of these candidates, or worked up a good hate toward the others. Even among the campaign staffers, anger at the opposition seemed muted. Besides, after eight years of grumbling over Gov. Jim Douglas, Democrats want to win, and will likely unite behind whoever comes out ahead.

Because it was so close, a recount is possible, and so are complaints of foul play by the candidates who come in second and third. But the candidates and their supporters know that whining will do their party no good. That long-planned noon “unity rally” today may have to be postponed, and if its’ really close – a couple of hundred votes or so – the runner-up would be justified in asking for a second look.

In fact, if it stays this close, the runner-up, party officials, and everyone else should at least ask the town clerks to make sure they reported the right figures, and that their reports were accurately recorded. A mere transcribing  error could produce the wrong result in this case, and the Democratic nominee ought to be the candidate who won the primary, not just the first tabulation.

Check back later in the day for a fuller post. (Or a special Thursday post if it takes that long to figure out who won).

Correction, though it has already been corrected: Readers who checked in early Monday morning read that Racine had been endorsed by the Vermont Natural Resources Council. The NRDC may not and does not endorse candidates. The endorser was the Vermont League of Conservation Voters.

Tomorrow is Primary Day. Wanna know who’s gonna win? .

Lotsa luck. So would everybody else. But they don’t know. Quite possibly, nobody knows. What fun.

No doubt some Vermonters (perhaps including the five Democratic candidates for governor) are distressed by this uncertainty. Better to savor it. Like much of life in Vermont, it’s a chance to live life they way it used to be lived, a throwback to the days before polling.

Or at least before polling was reasonably accurate, which is roughly 60 years now, meaning longer than most folks remember. Polling’s biggest mistake came in 1948, when all the surveys predicted that Thomas Dewey would beat President Harry Truman, inspiring the Chicago Tribune to hit the streets with journalism’s most celebrated headline. “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

(A blunder firmly stuck in the newspaper’s memory as late as 1976, when the managing editor telephoned the reporter covering the New Hampshire Primary warning him not to call the winners prematurely because “we remember 1948 here”).

Since then, polling has gotten a lot more sophisticated, and if it’s hardly perfect, rare is the election in which almost nobody has the foggiest notion about who’s going to win. In recent years, two Vermont news organizations, the Burlington Free Press and WCAX-TV (Channel 3), contracted with polling firms. This year, they didn’t, perhaps to save money, perhaps because the polling firm Channel 3 had been using, Research 2000, has been sued by another client, and seems to be at least temporarily out of business.

Besides, this race might be effectively impossible to predict, even with a passel of polls. In any election, but especially in a primary, pollsters don’t just make their calls, ask the folks who answer for their favorite candidate, and tote up the answers. That would be pointless because not everybody who answers the phone will vote. So the pollsters first have to “screen for likely voters,” to use the industry jargon.

Hard to do when: (a) the primary is earlier than it has been; (b) no candidate has excited most voters; but (c) no candidate has repulsed them, either, and most Democrats could happily support any one of the five. The usual screening technique – asking respondents if they intend to vote, then maybe asking if they really intend to vote – might not be all that effective.

This could explain why no poll results have been leaked. There are polls. Two candidates, Deb Markowitz and Peter Shumlin, have retained pollsters. Presumably senior staff at both campaigns have some results. Yet none of those senior staffers seems to have sidled up to a reporter and whispered sweet statistics in his or her ears.

Meaning either that neither of those candidates is ahead (or at least safely ahead) or that the results remain inconclusive thanks to the likely-voter screening problem.

(Wait. Isn’t it possible that the senior campaign staffer, even armed with a poll showing his/her candidate in the lead, is too scrupulous to leak confidential campaign information?

Uhh, now that you ask: no).

So Vermonters are happily in the dark. We can all expect some real suspense tomorrow evening. Just think: a reality show with no vulgar housewives. What fun!

Does this mean the race can’t be scoped out at all?

Of course not. So let’s scope, starting with the conventional wisdom, a good place to start because, despite its bad image, the conventional wisdom is usually right, or it wouldn’t have become conventional.

The first conventional wisdom about political campaigns is that the candidate with the most money usually wins. So it’s a two-person race, between Markowitz and Shumlin, the ones who’ve raked in the bucks.

But here’s some conflicting conventional wisdom. In a low-turnout primary, which this is likely to be, the candidate with the best grass-roots support usually wins.

That would be Doug Racine, endorsed by the teachers union, the state employees union, the AFL-CIO, and the Vermont League of Conservation Voters (not, as stated in earlier versions of this post, the Vermont Natural Resources Council, which may not and does not endorse candidates). If all these organizations do a get-out-the-vote operation tomorrow – phone banks, email reminders, ferrying voters to the polls – Racine has a shot, too.

Especially because he’s the only candidate from vote-heavy Chittenden County, and was endorsed last week by a passel of influential Progressive Party members. Only around 10 percent of Vermonters are committed Progs (party chair Martha Abbott got 12 percent running for auditor in 2008), but they tend to be politically aware. They vote.

So it’s a three-person race.

Except for that little voice saying you can’t rule out Matt Dunne. In the last few weeks, he’s been endorsed by the Herald of Randolph, the Addison Independent and the Stowe Reporter. In the last few months, he’s raised more money than Racine and has run some pretty good television ads. His campaign seems to have some energy. At 40, he’s the youngest of the candidates, and the one most at home in the high-tech wired (or, actually, wireless) realm that may or may not be the future.

So it’s a four-person race.

Having come this far, can we take it a step farther and find some way for the fifth candidate, Susan Bartlett, to win?

Not really.

“This is anybody’s race to win,” Bartlett’s campaign claimed in an email yesterday.

Anybody’s but hers. Too bad in a way, because one can make the case that she’d be a good governor. But she never raised enough money to be competitive, nor did she give voters a compelling reason to select her over one of her better-known, better-financed opponents.

But wouldn’t it be funny if she did win?

Whoever wins will debate Republican Brian Dubie Thursday evening in South Burlington. The News Guy will be there, liveblogging from the debate hall (as will Anne Galloway of VT Digger) for Vermont Public Television. The next evening, the News Guy will be on VPT’s ‘Vermont This Week,’ broadcast at 7:30 PM Friday and 11:30 AM Sunday

So what kind of governor – based on the (sort of) detailed economic policy statements all have now unveiled – would any of these five Democratic candidates for governor be?

A Democratic governor, that’s what kind.

Whatever their differences – and there are some – all the Democrats propose to govern the state as one would expect a Democrat would govern. Unlike Brian Dubie, the unopposed Republican one of them will run against after Tuesday’s primary, not one of them promises to cut taxes.

Which does not mean any would raise taxes. Only one even dares to mention the possibility, and the possibilities he mentions are either temporary or selective or both.

So to say that the Democrats would govern like Democrats is not to say that they would govern as Republican caricatures of Democrats, the kind who would make the rich pay higher taxes to finance more generous services for the poor.

These are five center-left Democrats. One or two are a tad lefter and one or two a tad centerer than the others. But as is often the case, Candidate A might be slightly to the left of Candidate B on one issue, but slightly to the right of him/her on another. So where one puts them along the ideological spectrum (assuming that the ideological spectrum is important) depends on which issues any voter finds most important.

From one perspective, for instance, Doug Racine might be considered the most liberal of the contenders. He’s the one who’s open to tapping into the “Rainy Day Fund” or even imposing a temporary tax hike (though he doesn’t think it’s needed now) to avoid budget cuts harmful to the poor. He’s even suggested making sure Internet sales are subject to the state sales tax, and perhaps a special tax on sugar-heavy processed snacks and sodas.

But Racine’s overall policy outlook is relatively restrained. He proposes no big spending programs. Instead he wants to “get back to basics” by being a governor who is “directly involved in every phase of our economic development strategy,” starting with the selection of “the right Secretary of Commerce and Community Development.”

Racine, then, seems to be pledging to improve the state’s economy less by a specific economic program than by his own forceful leadership, with which he hopes to energize state government.

By contrast, Matt Dunne’s rhetoric is unabashedly pro-business. His economic policy paper is titled, “The Innovation State: a Business Plan for Vermont,” and he even accepts the Republican complaint that the state’s economy is held back by “complicated regulations and taxes (and) burdensome costs.”

But Dunne’s specific policy proposals are possibly the most audacious of the bunch (if not always the most comprehensible, at least to those to whom power point presentations remain exotic). He’s calling on the state to issue two separate revenue bonds, each for roughly $400 million, one to finance renewable energy production, the other to bring high-speed Internet service “to the last mile” of every road in the state.

Similarly, Susan Bartlett, the self-described “moderate” in the race, has one of the more novel ideas. Arguing that “innovation and entrepreneurs have always been a part of Vermont,” and could be “true job creators,” Bartlett would establish an ”Office of Innovation and Intellectual Property” to “coordinate the various pieces of our business support organizations (and) educate regional economic development groups about the potential of intellectual property.”

The other two candidates, arguably the most establishment as well as (by the conventional political wisdom) the front-runners, exhibit a comparable mix of caution and daring. Deb Markowitz’s “Jump Start VT” (she does not use spaces between the words; there are depths of degradation to which this web site will not descend) isn’t just an economic policy document. It’s an all-purpose laundry list of positions on issues ranging from ethnic diversity to education.

No sweeping, big-spending programs, but a few bold moves. Markowitz would emulate New Hampshire and require young Vermonters to stay in school until they are 18 unless they have graduated and she would take state money out of big banks that don’t grant adequate credit to Vermont businesses.

Peter Shumlin does have one big-spending plan, $33 million to provide “universal pre-kindergarten education” statewide. But he would pay for it, according to his economic policy (“Vision for Vermont,” spaces in the original) by releasing the state’s imprisoned “non-violent offenders back into society,” which he claims would save $40 million.

Shumlin’s numbers seem to be accurate. His confidence that the Legislature will agree to such a large-scale release of convicted criminals may be misplaced.

As any Vermonter who has been watching television in recent weeks knows, Shumlin also wants to bring a single-payer health care financing system to the state. So does Dunne. Racine favors a similar approach, though he doesn’t say so on his campaign web site, calling only for “universal” coverage. That’s what Bartlett and Markowitz want, too.

Does this mean that if one of these candidates gets elected, Vermonters can expect a universal health insurance system?

No, at least not for a while. The single-payer option is especially iffy, being, for the moment, illegal until 2017 under the new national health law. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the U.S. Senate champion of a “Medicare for all” plan, has said he will try next year to get Congress to move that date up to 2014. Congress seems unlikely to comply, and at any rate, 2014 is two years beyond the term of the governor to be elected this November.

Health care is not the only area of near-unanimity among the Democrats. They all want to bring high-speed Internet to everyone.  They all want to provide small businesses with more credit options. They all want Vermonters to produce and consume more “sustainable” energy, created neither from fossil fuels nor from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which they all think should shut down when its license expires in 2012. They all want to use the state’s higher education institutions to help spark a knowledge-based “green” economy.

All five also clutter their position papers with stale bromides. “I want every family to know that if they encourage their children to do well in school and to work hard, they will be better off,” proclaims Racine. “To move together as a state we will need to work together,” intones Markowitz. “Build a Vermont future that is a global leader in the innovation economy, based on a foundation of authentic communities, strategic location, and our premium Vermont brand,” says Dunne.

If pressed, all five would probably endorse motherhood and apple pie, too.

Another commonality is that, like most candidates these days, the Democrats (Shumlin’s pre-kindergarten plan being the exception) make little effort to provide the nitty-gritty details of how much their proposals will cost and how they would pay for them.

In fairness, most of their plans wouldn’t cost much, and they all suggest trimming some state programs. But, just to take one example, Dunne does not seem to have asked an economist to run the numbers on how (or whether) the revenues from Internet and energy users would pay off those $400 million bonds. The other contenders are comparably vague about how they would pay for everything they suggest.

It may be too early to condemn the candidates for this fuzziness. At this point, only Democratic primary voters care what the candidates say, and they are saying enough to give those voters an idea of how each of them would try to govern the state. Each is presenting a vision. Whether the numbers add up isn’t all that important yet.

After all, they are running for governor, not emperor. Governors do not promulgate programs. They suggest them to the Legislature, which will create nothing it can’t pay for. Almost certainly, that means pay for without raising taxes, which the candidates (Racine’s limited exceptions noted above) don’t want to do, either. Like presidents, governors not only don’t get everything they want, they end up not even asking for everything they really want.

It’s still helpful for the voters to know what the governor-to-be really wants.

This generosity of spirit will not last long. Whoever wins the Democratic primary and Brian Dubie will both be pressed harder to tell the voters how they will pay for new programs or for tax cuts. But that’s for next week.