Tired tonight?  Me, too. Still, it's worth starting thinking about what this election means. People have already started in with the recriminations, and in a multi-candidate race that means the spoiler question.  Was there a spoiler? Who was it? Why did they screw things up for the rest of us?

First off, let's drop the word "spoiler". It tends to piss people off whenever it comes up, whether it's accurate or not. It might be better to ask about the candidates, and whether their presence led to the near-deadlock we're in now.

An example of the discussion is a set of comments from one of my Facebook friends, who was highly critical of Susan Bartlett. Here's an example of some of the things she's said:

Thanks  for nothing, Bartlett, for staying in a race where you had less than a  snowball's chance in Hades. Will we have you to thank for the  unthinkable this November?

And:

I don’t really think these are correct. There’s an implication that Susan was in the race for some reason other than to win: that she was feeding her own ego, or positioning herself for some future career outside of the Legislature.

I don’t think there’s any reason to say that. For one thing, as long as I’ve known Susan, which is a long time, she has never struck me as an ego-trip kind of person. What I think was going on here is that Susan had what she saw was a real political difference with the other candidates, and she thought she could offer people a real choice. I never thought there was any kind of path to victory for her, but that’s a separate question. She obviously did, and that’s why she ran.

You could also argue that she really didn’t have much impact on the outcome: she didn’t divert that many votes, or grassroots workers, or dollars from the other campaigns. She didn’t even win her own county, did she?

A bigger question, though, is that it isn’t obvious that she drew disproportionately from a single candidate. Possibly more Deb than the others because she might have attracted some voters who were motivated by the chance to elect a woman, but the conventional wisdom is that a weak candidate hurts the other candidate who is most ideologically similar, and that person isn’t obvious. It’s entirely possible that even if this had been a three-way or four-way race it would have ended up just about this close.

The candidate who has baffled me from the beginning in this race was Matt Dunne. I like Matt, I think he’s a very attractive and energetic candidate, but his role in the race never made any sense to me. From Matt’s perspective, getting into the race late, I don’t really see how he looked at the candidates who were already in and thought that there was something missing there, so that he could significantly add to the array of choices.

Does that make him a spoiler? No, in part because, even more than Susan, his votes could have been split evenly among the three candidates who finished above him. That’s what people mean when they say he was everybody’s second choice.