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

The top money man

More politics below, but first an update on a post of three months ago (Non-Union Blues, April 28) about the Douglas Administration’s refusal to accept a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) for construction of the new Lake Champlain bridge.

Under a PLA, construction unions agree not to strike and to accept cost saving concessions such as surrendering premium pay for late shift work. In return, the contractor agrees to accept workers chosen at union hiring halls in the region, guaranteeing local residents some of the good-paying jobs on the project.

Last spring, New York State and the Federal Government agreed to a PLA for the bridge. Under pressure from the state branch of the Associated General Contractors, Vermont did not, so there was no public PLA.

The top money Dem

But according to a news release sent out Friday by the Vermont Building and Construction Trades Council, Vermont and New York unions have reached agreement on a private PLA with the prime contractor, Flatiron Construction of Colorado.

“The PLA will accomplish what Gov. Douglas was sadly unwilling to do – guarantee local residents an opportunity to land a job on this $70 million project,” Vermont Building and Construction Trades Council President Jeff Potvin said in the press release.

It isn’t clear how many workers from the area will get jobs on the bridge project. Potvin acknowledged that Flatiron will “self-perform a large portion of the project,” meaning it will bring its own workers from elsewhere. But it does seem that the more Vermont workers will get bridge jobs with the PLA than would have without it, and that the cost savings will go to Flatiron, not Vermont’s taxpayers.

It will be interesting to see if whoever ends up with the Democratic nomination for governor tries to use this issue in the general election campaign against Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie.

Oh, yes: the governor’s race. Wherein we segue to the significance of the campaign finance reports submitted by the candidates last week.

This significance should not be overstated. The typical voter does not pay attention to which candidate raises more money, being far more interested in which candidate he or she finds appealing.

But neither should the significance be pooh-poohed. First of all, the money itself is important; more is better than less. Second, the reports themselves send signals, however short-lived, that can speed or slow a candidate’s progress. The more money a candidate has, the more seriously he or she is taken by what the eminent journalist Jack Germond called “the political community”—reporters, TV commentators, and, not least, potential contributors, who prefer to bestow their largesse on likely winners.

There is little doubt, then, that last Friday’s headlines provided a boost to Dubie ($943,000 raised, $475,623 cash on hand) and Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, the top collector among Democrats ($523,946 raised, $186,756 on hand).

Also coming out ahead in the perception game were Democrats Matt Dunne ($267,861 and $132,959) and Sen. Peter Shumlin ($418,490 and $207,134.).

The news was not as good for Sen, Doug Racine ($210,158 and $63,097) and it was downright awful for Sen. Susan Bartlett, who reported raising only $70,920 from just 232 contributors, leaving her with only $11,146 in the bank.

As last Wednesday’s post noted, a candidate need not have the most money. She does have to have enough money.

Eleven grand is not enough money.

Bartlett insisted she would not drop out, and there’s no reason why she should. She has nowhere else to go for the next month, and there’s always the possibility of a “miracle,” which in this case would require no supernatural intervention, just a fairly even five-way split in which nobody gets much more than 20 percent of the primary vote on August 24 and anyone could win a squeaker.

But it would take something close to supernatural intervention. That isn’t the way multi-candidate primaries usually shake out.

The situation must be frustrating for Bartlett, who is highly regarded in Montpelier. Even as they pronounce her candidacy hopeless, politicians and legislative onlookers keep noting  that she might be a strong candidate in the general election, and a good governor if elected.

But nobody every claimed that politics was fair, or even rational.

A look behind the raw numbers indicates even better news for Dunne, and perhaps even worse news for Racine, who has only raised $107,742 from 491 contributors in the last year. His total includes the amount he raised before last July’s reporting deadlines. Dunne, who did not announce his candidacy until late last year, raised all his money in the last twelve months from 722 contributors.

That’s not as many as Dubie (an impressive 2,724 contributors in the last 12 months), or  Markowitz (1,070), but substantially better than Shumlin (390) who only kept pace with Dunne by lending his own campaign $150,000.  At the very least, Dunne seems to know how to raise money.

As, obviously, do Dubie and Markowitz. They have also spent the most money. Shumlin actually has a bit more cash on hand now than Markowitz, even after paying for the campaign’s first round of television ads. And while Dubie has far more money in the bank than anyone else, he is also spending it faster than anyone else, much of it on professional fund-raising and other political consulting firms.

All the candidates raised most of their money from, and spent most of it in, Vermont. That may not last. It is not unreasonable to suspect that the big out-of-state fundraising starts now, not reportable until after the election. Some voters, it seems think there is something wrong with raising money beyond Vermont’s borders.

But candidates need money, and have to raise it where they can find it. Asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously said, “that’s where the money is.” Campaign money is in Boston, New York, Washington, California, and Texas. Dubie has already raised thousands from Texas, and spent thousands there, on Harris Media an Austin political consulting firm serving conservative Republican candidates.

No doubt researchers from all six campaigns are poring over the filings of the other five, hoping to find either a contribution or an expenditure that could prove politically awkward. Two potential entries: Dubie got a $2,000 contribution from the Ely Lilly Co., the Indianapolis pharmaceutical giant. Drug companies are not universally admired these days.

The lieutenant governor also received $1,000 from Dairy Farmers of America of Kansas City, MO, and another $1,000 from its affiliate, Syracuse-based Dairylea Cooperative, Inc. DFA is the milk marketing cooperative that has been the target of several anti-trust allegations, (and at least one continuing investigation) and some Vermont dairy farmers blame it for keeping their prices low.