Tomorrow, candidates have to file their campaign finance reports, revealing how much they’ve collected, and from whom. How much they’ve spent, and on what.

Though money and politics is the subject of the bulk of today’s post, those filings will not be discussed here Friday. As regular readers know, the intent of this web site is to cover the stories nobody else is covering, and almost every major news organization will send a reporter to the Secretary of State’s office Thursday afternoon to get the info.

All those reporters can read and do arithmetic at least as fast and as accurately as this one, who is happy to defer to them.

This one will, however, get copies of the filings, look them over, and discuss them Monday if there is anything worth discussing that the other folks have not already covered.

Speaking of politics and money, a housekeeping note and an appeal. The News Guy, who has a life outside these postings, is going to take some time off in August (exact dates to be determined). Aside from the time off, many of the 39 days and (roughly) ten posts between now and the August 24 primary will be devoted to covering that primary, primarily the contest for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

This means going to campaign events, which in turn means driving around the state, which in turn means buying gasoline and occasional lunches and possibly a motel room or two if an important event ends too late and too far away to drive home safely.

It means, in short, spending money, and despite those advertisements you see over on the right, the News Guy’s major source of revenue is reader donations. Readers who have not donated are urged to do so.

Just Look over on the right under “Pages,” where it says, “Donate. It’s easy.

Speaking of politics, money, and news coverage, kudos to the Burlington Free Press, which, first of all, did not run last week’s very bad Associated Press story about the race for Auditor as if there were two, not three, major candidates. Then on Monday, the Freep had a front page story centering on the other guy, Doug Hoffer, who is challenging State Sen. Ed Flanagan for the Democratic nomination. (The winner will take on Republican incumbent Tom Salmon).

One of the papers that did run the bad AP story, the Brattleboro Reformer, then used the AP’s corrective (but not correction; it didn’t acknowledge the earlier story) about the Democratic primary, and also had a staff-written story about Hoffer.

But the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus and the (jointly owned) Rutland Herald only appended a semi-correction to a letter to the editor, promising to do better in the future and saying “(T)he Associated Press was in error by not including Doug Hoffer in its article.”

Yeah, but you were in error, too, fellas. Editors ought to know who is running for major statewide office.

Okay, now to those campaign finance reports, even though we don’t yet know who raised how much.

Except that we sort of do.

One may take, as the saying goes, to the bank, that Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, the only Republican seeking the governorship, will report having raised more than any of the five Democrats. A couple of weeks ago, one of Dubie’s senior campaign staffers mentioned the figure of $800,000. Sure, he could have been bragging. But that would have been foolish. The exact figure will be known to all the world Thursday evening. The smarter move would have been to low-ball the expectation. Dubie has probably raised more than 800 grand.

As to the Democrats, it’s all but certain that Secretary of State Deb Markowitz will report raising more money, and Sen. Susan Bartlett less, than their three competitors. Markowitz’s campaign aides have not thrown around a number, a la the Dubie camp. But they are obviously operating under the assumption that their candidate will lead the money parade as she did in the earlier filing last summer.

Bartlett effectively acknowledged she’d be last, issuing a statement Tuesday afternoon conceding that after the numbers are in the “conventional ‘wisdom’ will be that my candidacy is in last place.”

But Bartlett argued that “there have been many Vermont elections in which the highest spender hasn’t been successful, I’ve won some of those elections and plan to do it again in August.”

Leaving the three guys, Sens. Doug Racine and Peter Shumlin and former Sen. Matt Dunne, perhaps in that order.

Or perhaps not. Dunne will no doubt have the least of the three, but Shumlin has bought television advertising time while Racine has not, perhaps meaning that Shumlin has more money to spend.

Or just that Racine is biding his time and saving his money for later. Amy Shollenberger, his campaign manager, said the campaign was “working on  a paid media strategy for sure,” and exploring “different options.”

Which could mean that the campaign isn’t sure it will be able to afford much TV time.

“We’re running a really grass-roots campaign,” Shollenberger said.  “It’s different from some of the others. We relying on a lot of volunteer help.”

So say officials of all the Democratic campaigns except Markowitz’s.

“The ground game in this race is going to be very important,” said Shumlin Campaign Manager Alex MacLean. “It’s going to be mail, phone calls, and canvassing, because we’re targeting such a small number of people.”

Kevin  O’Holleran of the Dunne camp had a similar message, saying the candidate who “comes in with the most money and is able to buy a whole bunch of TV time isn’t going to be successful. We’re building up more of a grass roots campaign.”

All that could be the denial and/or desperation of losers.

Or, in this case, it might be true.

Because the turnout really is likely to be quite small. Political Scientist Eric Davis suggests no more than 60,000 voters in the Democratic Primary. And the estimates go down from there, down to as low as 30,000.

Just to put this into some context, in 2008, Democratic candidate Gaye Symington got 69,534 votes finishing third in the governor’s race after running one of the most bumbling campaigns ever. Not just ever in Vermont. Ever anywhere. Yes, that was a general election, Still, her total would have to be considered the rock-bottom Democratic vote, a rock-bottom not likely to be reached next month.

If these low estimates turn out to be accurate, reaching the “masses” (even just the Democratic-voting masses) may be less important than mobilizing committed supporters, appealing to two or three socio-political niches, and getting loyal voters to the polls.

It would be kind of like “the old days”(“old” meaning back about 1980) when primary campaigns worried less about TV ads than about “identifying your ones and twos” (committeds and likelies) and arranging for enough high-school seniors and bored housewives to drive them to the polls.

An old-fashioned election. How Vermontish. It’s the political equivalent of eating local food, fixing up vintage houses, wearing fleece vests to dress up. It might work, Susan Bartlett is right. More money does not necessarily lead to victory.

But not enough money necessarily leads to defeat. The Democrats may be about to find out how much is enough.

First, some housekeeping:

Look up to your right, above where it says, “Pages” and below the blue bar.

There’s the link to the VT Digger web sit.

The News Guy and VT Digger are going to be doing a little more cooperating. The News Guy will write some stories for VT Digger and occasionally run stories from the VT Digger site on this one.

Today’s (Wednesday’s) post originally appeared at VT Digger last Friday. Here it is, slightly tweaked, for News Guy readers.

What’s that? From the more perspicacious among you, one hears the question: Isn’t this cheating? After all, if we could have read this on another site some days ago, aren’t we missing out on one original post?

The defendant pleads semi-guilty with extenuating circumstances. First, this will not happen very often. Second, the News guy is now engaged in some complex, time–consuming research on a few potentially significant posts.

Oh, and OK, with the candor on which this site prides itself, yeah, this is also the time of year when a fella wants to spend a little time outside. Readers should understand. Are you Vermonters, or what?

OK, enough housekeeping. On to politics:

Some questions about the Democratic primary for governor:

–How did there get to be five (count ‘em—5) bona fide contenders?

–Didn’t anyone in the Democratic Party see that this could be a prescription for defeat and try to talk one or more of the five into running for lieutenant governor or…or whatever?

–If not, why not?

It isn’t that multi-candidate fields are unprecedented. Middlebury College political science professor Eric Davis said he could remember two occasions when several candidates vied for a major nomination in Vermont.

Six Republicans ran for the U.S. Senate nomination in 1980 when Sen. Pat Leahy was seeking his second term, and four Democrats ran for the open U.S. House seat in 1988, the one Rep. Jim Jeffords vacated to run for the Senate, Davis said.

But those were federal races. Besides, as Davis pointed out, “in both instances, the winner of the large-field primary lost the general election.”

Even if not unprecedented, five candidates for one nomination is unusual, especially because none of the five is a fringe candidate with no hope of victory. Right now in Maine, for instance, there are seven Republicans running for governor, but polls show that four of them are stuck with less than four percent of the vote with just a week to go (though with 47 percent undecided, anyone could win).

The Vermont contest starts off with no apparent front-runner. And unlike many multi-candidate fields, which feature two or three “serious” contenders and a wacko candidate or two (almost every state has its version of Vermont perennial candidate Peter Diamondstone) all five are mainstream Democrats with impressive credentials—three senior state senators, the incumbent Secretary of State, a former legislator who ran statewide once before.

Still, all that explains only what is happening, not why. To get to the ‘whys,’ return to those questions at the beginning, which can be combined into one question with a simple answer.

There are five Democrats in the race because all five wanted to run and there was no way to stop them.

“The problem with Vermont Democrats is that there’s been such a build-up of ambition after eight years of Jim Douglas that the minute he announced he wasn’t going to run, those horses were out of the barn,” said long-time Democratic strategist Steve Terry.

Despite the crowded field, from each candidate’s perspective, running now made perfect sense.

“If history any guide, whoever wins this year will end up serving at least six years,” said Davis, meaning that a politician with ambitions to be governor “really didn’t have much choice.”

Especially, Davis said, because all three Vermont seats in Washington are filled by strong incumbents who are likely to stay in office for several years. That makes the governorship the only realistic option.

So each candidate acted on his or her own, asking no one’s permission.

There’s nothing peculiar to Vermont about this phenomenon. All over the country, politics are becoming more candidate-driven, with party organizations diminishing in importance. Outside of a few outposts—Chicago, Newark, some counties in rural Texas and Kentucky—the days when a few movers and shakers made political decisions in a smoke-filled room are long gone, and not because hardly anybody smokes any more.

If Vermont ever had the kind of strong party structure where a few political leaders and major contributors could select a candidate—or scare one out of a primary race – it was long ago, Davis and Terry agreed.

“The parties never amounted a damn,” Terry said. “It’s all been individual. “

In Montpelier eateries (and drinkeries) one hears snatches of conversation wondering why party leaders didn’t “crack some heads,” as someone put it, to get one or two of the candidates out of the race. But the question seems to express a longing for a world that no longer exists, if it ever did in Vermont.

There is one report of an attempt by a few leading Democrats to urge former Sen. Matt Dunne, at 40 the youngest of the candidates, to run for lieutenant governor instead.  But Dunne said that while a few Democrats told him he’d be “a shoo-in” for lieutenant governor, “no one approached with anything remotely like strong pressure.”

Strong pressure doesn’t seem to work any more. It doesn’t even work when it does work. It is generally accepted in Democratic circles that Gov. Howard Dean pressured Sen. Peter Shumlin to run for lieutenant governor in 2002, leaving the top spot for then-Lt. Gov. Doug Racine. That avoided a primary, but both men lost anyway. Now they are two of the five contenders, along with Dunne, Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz ,and Sen. Susan Bartlett.

Both Davis and Terry said that only two Democrats –Leahy and  Dean—could possibly persuade a candidate to drop out or to seek another office.

But Leahy is running for his seventh term this year. If he had tried to push a candidate out of the race he would have risked offending that candidate and his/her supporters. No incumbent likes to upset part of his own political base.

Besides, Leahy has always kept his distance from the inner workings and internal divisions of the state’s Democratic Party. And so has Dean since he left the governorship in early 2003.

In some states there are alternative power centers that might pressure a candidate out of a race. If a Democrat in California, for instance, found that the Hispanic community was united against him, he might realizes his chances of victory were slim, and withdraw. The same would be true for a contender who offended African-Americans in Illinois, the Jewish community in New York, the United Auto Workers in Michigan, or the Roman Catholic Church in Rhode Island. In all those cases, a few carefully chosen words from a local power broker could convince someone not to run.

But Vermont has no comparable racial, ethnic, or labor constituencies. It doesn’t even have a potent big city Democratic organization because Democrats don’t control the closest thing Vermont has to a big city. And because there is no dominant industry in Vermont, there is no dominant fund-raising community.

Thanks to campaign finance laws, candidates have had to develop broad donor bases both in and out of the state. This diminishes the clout of any one contributor. Mr. Moneybags may give the candidate only $1,000. Even if he can convince a few of his friends to cough up a similar amount, he doesn’t have enough power to push anyone around.

The identifiable constituencies with some influence on Vermont Democrats – public employee and teachers unions, environmental organizations—are not political hard-ball players. The teachers union (the Vermont National Education Association) is likely to endorse one of the contenders, perhaps this week, spokesman Darren Allen said, but it made no effort to urge any candidate to drop out.

(Montpelier scuttlebutt, for what it is worth, holds that Racine or Dunne is the most likely endorsee).

Along with worrying about what Terry called a “bloodletting” that could tarnish the image of the eventual primary winner, it is the financial implications of the five-person field that Democrats worry about most.

“The winner will be financially exhausted August 24 (Primary Day),” Terry said, while Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, the unopposed Republican,  “will have more than a million in the bank.” Like other Democrats, Terry wondered whether his party’s nominee would still be able to raise money from a possibly exhausted Democratic donor base.

But Davis said he thought the Democratic winner wouldn’t have to spend much on the campaign because it made little sense to buy broadcast television time during a summer campaign that will likely end with a low-turnout primary.

“I think it might not be a good investment,” he said. “I would be surprised if a candidate spent more than $50,000 (buying television time).”

Stressing direct mail, phone banks and personal campaigning, Davis said,  a Democrat might win the primary after spending only about $350,000, perhaps keeping competitive with Dubie for the fall campaign, which should cost each candidate somewhat more than another million dollars.

Another possible bright (or at least less dark) spot for the Democrats is that five-person races don’t often remain real five-person races. Within the next few weeks, two or three of the candidates, based on poll results and fund-raising reports, are likely to pull away from the others. The also-rans will then find it harder to raise money or be taken seriously (though perhaps also to resist the temptation to go on the attack.)

“By early July, we’ll know,” Davis said.

Leaving one more question: Just what will we know?

Now that the Legislative session is semi-officially over, the 2010 campaign for governor has semi-officially begun.

Of course, it semi- semi-officially began in January of 2009 (no, that was not a typo; that was 2009) when Sen. Doug Racine of Richmond said he would run.

But like two of his opponents – Sens. Peter Shumlin of Putney and Susan Bartlett of Hyde Park – Racine was otherwise occupied until May 13, when the Legislature adjourned, but with the proviso that it “reconvene on the ninth day of June, 2010, at ten o’clock in the forenoon if the Governor should fail to approve and sign any bill and should he return it to the house of origin.”

So technically the Legislature remains in session, which created a minor political flap when the campaign of Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie’s, the unchallenged Republican, solicited contributions from lobbyists for an event scheduled before the official adjournment. Realizing its error, the campaign promptly unsolicited.

But technically shmecknically. For all practical purposes, “The Ledge” (a term coined by the late Molly Ivins to describe the version down in Texas, but too good not to be given wider currency) is over, and the attention of the state’s politicians – and its journalists – can shift to the campaign. It has.

It will be a long campaign, and because brevity is a virtue, today’s exercise will focus on just two features, the second of which is an early assessment of how the campaign is going.

It is not going well.

But first, a warning of sorts. Each of the various players in this comedy-drama has his or her own role. The role here is to ride herd. This web site hereby appoints itself a (one of many, it is to be hoped) campaign truth squad. Every word said or written by every candidate or released in his or her name will be examined, be it in a speech, an interview, an advertisement, a web site communication. Misstatement, miscalculation, deception will be exposed.

Mercilessly.

And gleefully. The News Guy is indifferent as to who wins the August 24 Democratic primary or the general election in November. He is hostile – very hostile — to factual error, unsupported assertions, misuse of data, conclusions based on conjecture rather than verifiable truth, cheap shots, meaningless cant, and will take great joy in calling them out.

But not with a petty, “gotcha” attitude. Nits will be left un-picked. Minor errors, inconsistencies, and slips of the tongue during interviews or debates are…well, minor errors, inconsistencies, and slips of the tongue. The point of this exercise is not to catch candidates in the kind of trivial flubs everybody makes in spontaneous speech. It is to stop them from substantively misleading the electorate.

Now, as to this business about the campaign not going well.

OK, it’s early. There’s plenty of time left for improvement. The early signs, though, are not encouraging. Judging from the campaign web sites (which is where most of the activity takes place for now), the candidates seem to be heading toward a campaign which will be: (a) dominated by pabulum; and (b) about nothing.

Or, to say the same thing in different terms, about itself.

In fairness to Vermont politicians, this politics of the self-referential (post-modern politics?) is a nationwide phenomenon. All over the country, races are being won or lost not according to any candidate’s vision of the future or position on substantive issues, but on who ran the less honorable campaign (“He did.” No, he did.”) and whose commercials were more misleading.

The scary, early, signs that Vermont may be headed in that direction came in the flapette between the campaigns of Democrats Matt Dunne and Secretary of State Deb Markowitz following Dunne’s call for all the contenders to reveal their personal financial assets.

Racine agreed. Shumlin called the idea “Montpelier parlor games.” Bartlett said voters are “concerned about their future and the future of Vermont, not the details of my finances.” But the Markowitz campaign launched a counter-attack against Dunne.

“If this was anything more than political posturing Sen. Dunne would have used his 11 years in the legislature to make this Vermont law,” campaign manager Paul Tencher said. “He also would have advised his opponents of his request before holding a press conference.” (all this according to a May 14 story in the Times-Argus).

He did both, shot back Dunne’s campaign manager, Kevin O’Holleran.

Apparently he did. In 1994, Dunne was a major backer (though not the sponsor) of H-830, which would have required the kind of disclosure he now supports. It failed.

On the issue, Dunne would appear to have a strong case. In both politics and government (except for the Legislature) Vermont’s disclosure and transparency requirements are weak. In many states candidates now have to reveal their financial assets. In theory, there is always the possibility that a candidate could hold huge blocks of stock in say, Entergy, or Corrections Corporation of America. If so, voters ought to know that.

But Bartlett is right, too. Voters care about what the candidates plan to do in office, not their portfolios. In her case, she and her husband reported income last year of less than $100,000. Assuming they don’t have the most incompetent financial advisor in captivity, they don’t own enough stock in anything to rise to the conflict-of-interest level. Neither, in all likelihood, do the other contenders.

Yet this is so far what the campaign is about. Whoever thinks it’s about anything else is invited to check the web sites and look for specific proposals or substantive ideas.

Good hunting.

Well, Bartlett may have one, worthy of future consideration. Check it out here. But for the most part, the sites are full of tedious jargon and tired slogans designed only to offend no one. As a result, they also interest no one.

Two items deserve special mention. Dunne’s web site notes that “at age 22,  Matt’s neighbors elected him to the Vermont Legislature,” which is probably not true. Because what it says is that all of Dunne’s neighbors were 22 when they elected him to the legislature, which seems unlikely.

Then there is the latest advertisement on Dubie’s web site. It’s called “Pure Vermont” and manages, in three minutes and 26 seconds, to say almost nothing. But at the end, walking along a lakeshore, Dubie and his wife tell each other they love one another.

It could be along five months.