The potential spoiler in the most-watched Senate race in the nation is neither a he nor a she, but no one at all. Since 1975, Nevadans have had the option of choosing “None of These Candidates,” which appears on the ballot with the named candidates.

Nate Silver created a nifty bar graph showing what this has meant in the senatorial, presidential and gubernatorial races over the past decade. Most notably, Silver reminds us that in the 1998 U.S. Senate race, the 8,000-odd votes for “None of These Candidates” far exceeded the 395-vote margin between Harry Reid and John Ensign, enabling Reid to be re-elected.

Reid is hoping for a repeat and may well get his wish due to some surprising numbers in a recent poll by Mason-Dixon for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Sixty-six percent percent of Sharron Angle’s supporters wish someone else were the nominee, and it is not unreasonable to think a few of them may vote for “None” in November.

Four percent of respondents in the poll said they preferred “None of These” while 5 percent were undecided, so there is the potential for as much as 9 percent of the vote to go to “None.” But as Silver points out in his piece, the highest percent ever received by the category was 4.7 percent in the 2002 gubernatorial race.

Silver’s latest forecast model has Angle beating Reid by 1.3 percent.