Question 1: Is this fun? Or what?

Answer: Yes, and historic, too. If not the closest major-party, major-office primary anywhere, ever, it’s close. If nothing else, the Democratic primary is more fun to talk about than the economy, the sundry wars, or, for you Red Sox fans (one of which the News Guy confesses he is not, save when they play the Yankees), baseball. This election has it all: drama, suspense, even a little humor. So enjoy.

Question 2: Is having no winner (yet) bad for the Democrats, meaning good for Republican Brian Dubie?

Answer: Yes. But, then again, no.

Sure, the Democrats would be happier to have an undisputed winner, rather than one guy (Peter Shumlin) leading another (Doug Racine) by 192 votes, and only some 500 votes ahead of the third-place finisher (Deb Markowitz).

The Dems had hoped to hit the ground sprinting Wednesday, raising money and debating Dubie. The first debate had been scheduled for tomorrow evening (the News Guy was to have ‘liveblogged’ it from on site in South Burlington) but it has been postponed. Democrats think and Republicans fear that either Shumlin or Racine (and perhaps Markowitz, too) is a better debater than Dubie, who has a history of trying to meet his opponents one-on-one as rarely as possible. Now the Democrats will have to wait.

Question 3: For how long?

Answer: At least until Friday, maybe until Tuesday, or maybe even for another week after that. Racine issued a statement Wednesday saying he would not concede until the “official results” are released, which he said could come as early as Friday or as late as next Tuesday

Those official results could differ from the unofficial count showing Shumlin ahead. Early counts are often bedeviled by transcription errors, typographical errors, failures to communicate. Over the next few days, town clerks and other election officials will edit themselves and do some recapitulating. Who knows what their final count will be?

Whatever it is, both the second and third place finishers will be close enough to the leader to demand a recount, which could take another week or so.

Question 4: Wait a minute. Didn’t the last statewide recount take closer to two weeks?

Answer: Yes, but that was a general election, for Auditor in 2006, in which the top two candidates got 223,438 between them. Tuesday, slightly more than 72,000 people voted in the Democratic primary, a good turnout, but fewer ballots to count.

Question 5: But won’t another week’s delay be really bad for the Democrats?

Answer: Yes. Or, then again, maybe no. It would cost the eventual winner more valuable time, and it would be a real impediment to fund-raising. On the other hand, the delay would also keep Dubie out of the news and off-stage, or at least away from the center of the stage.

That’s where the top Democrats would be, right in the spotlight, where they are still looking good, acting like grown-ups and treating one another with civility. Shumlin did release a victory statement of sorts yesterday, but it was restrained. So far, the Democrats are neither strutting nor whining.

Question 6: How does anyone know that a recount would be more accurate?

Answer: Because it’s overseen by the courts and operates under much more rigorous standards. Each candidate can have a representative on site (the Washington County courthouse in Montpelier) to challenge any ballot that seems unusual and to monitor the tally. A recount would remove all reasonable doubt that the winner really got more votes than any of his or her opponents.

Question 7: So why not just agree on a recount right now?

Answer: Not a bad question. In fact, unless the leader has a margin of at least 400 or 500 votes,  it might be good politics for whoever wins the official tally to be the one calling for a recount. There will be one anyway if either opponent demands it, the chances are that the leader will still be ahead when the recount is over, and both the candidate and the party will appear public-spirited and generous.

Question 8: Aren’t Democrats worried that all those (mostly) young volunteers who worked so hard for one of the top three will be even more disheartened if one of the others ends up with the nomination, and therefore might not work for the nominee in the fall campaign?

Answer: Yes, and that’s a reasonable worry. But first of all there’s nothing they can do about it, and second it doesn’t loom as a major problem. These candidates, bland if enlightened, did not arouse much emotion. Even most of those who learned to love Candidate A didn’t seem to work up much animosity for Candidates B and C. Most of those campaign volunteers are first and foremost Democrats who want the Democratic nominee to win. They may have to work through a week or so of petulance and grumbling. But most of them will be knocking on doors for (fill in the nominee’s name) by mid-September.

Question 9: How did the Democrats get themselves into this pickle to begin with? Couldn’t they have locked all five candidates in a room and read them the riot act until at least two of them dropped out to seek another office or wait for another day?

Answer: It doesn’t work that way any more, if it ever did. Not just in Vermont, either., It hardly works that way anywhere.

Chicago Democrats or Dallas Republicans? Maybe. But that’s about it. No state party committee, and certainly not Vermont’s, has anywhere near the kind of power over ambitious candidates, who increasingly select themselves. The threat, ‘drop out or else,’ to any candidate would be met by the question, ‘or else what?’

At which point the threatener would have nothing to say. So nobody threatens.

OK, that’s enough questions for now. But remember, this is a good show our pols are putting on for the next few days. Enjoy it.

Scroll down for the earlier version of today’s post.

And don’t forget: The News Guy will be on Vermont Public Television’s ‘Vermont This Week’ Friday.

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