They're like horseplayers scratching their heads over the latest tip sheets. When touts whisper the freshest snatches of gossip in their ears, they don't really believe, but they listen anyway, unable to help themselves.

All around Cambridge, City Council candidates are worried. They spend all day courting rumors, but still have no idea how they're doing. "I could get thousands of votes--I could get almost none," one candidate mourned last week. "We're all in the eye of the storm," council incumbent Mary Ellen Preusser added last week. Like the racetrack, everyone else is in the dark too. "More people have given me more theories in the last week than I can remember," one city observer said Friday. "And none of them were right," he added. "The way I see it..."

One reason Cantabrigians care so much about municipal elections is that the stakes are sky-high. The entire nine-member council turns over every two years; the potential for change in the city is enormous. And even if only a single seat changes hands in Tuesday's balloting, the effects on city policy are potentially massive.

For several terms, progressive candidates, most of whom rally under the standard of the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), have held on to a slippery five-man majority. That one-vote edge accounts for rent control in the city of Cambridge. It is also responsible for recently passed limits on condominium conversion. And in large part, those votes have kept City Manager James L. Sullivan at the helm of the city administration.

Retaining that edge is the traditional job of the CCA, which currently controls four seats. Their margin on the crucial council votes has come only at the behest of independent Alfred E. Vellucci. And this year, as every year, the CCA is battling to gain a fifth seat. "We could end up with five, or we could go down to three," one CCA candidate said with a shudder last week.

Every Cambridge election is hard to call, but this year the job is especially difficult. An influx of condominium owners (and a correspoinding shrinkage in the number of tenants) has changed the city's demographics, and anti-rent control candidates are pushing hard for the votes of condo owners. Meanwhile, Cambridge's residents, most of them Democrats, are becoming increasingly wary of big-spending city government, and they demand to know why stratospheric tax rates haven't dropped because of new state aid.

Both those trends could boost the more conservative independent candidates--incumbents Thomas W. Danehy (Mayor), Kevin P. Crane, Lawrence A. Frisoli and Walter J. Sullivan and strong challengers Leonard Russell, Daniel Clinton and Richard Bentubo.

CCA supporters are counting on different shifts in city voters. One is the rising fear among tenants that rent control is in serious trouble here--in the course of the last two years, most cities in the area have ended rent controls. When they were lifted next door in Somerville, rents soared--a fact to which CCA politicians frequently refer. At the same time, the number of condominium conversions in Cambridge has increased dramatically. Only the frantic legal scrambling of CCA councilors slowed down the condo boom this year, and the prospect of renewed conversions may scare many tenants to the polls. Finally, the usually ephemeral student vote could help liberal candidacies this fall. CCA candidate David Sullivan, who has campaigned dorm-to-dorm this year in his second bid for a council seat, points to the increased number of Harvard registrants as reason to believe students might finally help choose city leaders. If all of the 1500 Harvard students registered to vote turn out (unlikely is too weak a word for this prospect), they would be able to singlehandedly elect one candidate, a fact that scares as many Cambridge politicians as it entices.

Cambridge politics is more than a battle between left and right, however. Even if the split between conservatives and liberals on the council remains the same, faces may change. David Sullivan, who lost by eight votes two years ago, will likely grab one of the nine seats--perhaps at the expense of a brother CCA councilor. Sullivan's large organization, student support, and $10,000 campaign budget have added name recognition to the widespread support earned by ten years of tenant activism, including the drafting of the council's condo control bill. Should Sullivan win, CCA veteran David A. Wylie may be closest to the door. Wylie and Duehay appeal to much the same constituency as Sullivan, and Wylie has spent half as much on his campaign as the other two. Both Duehay and Wylie were also hurt by the endorsement of a newly formed organization, the Concerned Cambridge Citizens, which refused to pledge its support to continuation of rent control. The other councilor Sullivan might draw votes from is Mary Ellen Preusser. "If he knocks someone out, it will be another CCA candidate--they all draw from the same pool of supporters," one observer predicted last week, although the possibility that the weakest conservative could fall also exists.

A battle is also raging in East Cambridge, where incumbents Alfred E. Vellucci and Frisoli are facing a strong challenge from Bentubo. Frisoli doesn't live in the Italian East Cambridge, but his ties with the Frisoli-Deguglielmo political clan won him support there two years ago. Vellucci, a 30-year fixture in city government, wins each election with the backing of a large personal network. But Bentubo is putting the pressure on. The owner of Richard's Arco has poured more than $5000, much of it from family members, into the campaign, and his posters and placards blanket (and litter) sections of the city. If he draws many Portuguese voters away from Vellucci, he could upset the council balance. But Vellucci has always thrived on hot fights--he won re-election two years ago shortly after the Boston Globe caught him holding down a no-show job. This year, unendorsed by either of the major slates, he is calling himself "The Lone Ranger." "Al loves it when everyone is after him--it just brings out the sympathy votes," one political observer explains.

The black community for years has sent Saundra Graham, who also holds influence because of her state representative position, to the council. This year, black challenger Alvin Thompson is mounting a strong opposition drive--it's unlikely that he will beat Graham and doubtful that he can win on his own, but nevertheless Graham has been working hard to make sure she retains her seat.

Among the old-line independents, the possibility of upset exists. Walter Sullivan will breeze into office, probably at the head of the field, but Mayor Danehy, Frisoli, and Crane all face fights. Two former councilors upset in the 1977 elections. Daniel Clinton and Leonard Russell, have outspent the incumbents ("People in office are less willing to hit up their supporters for dough" theorizes one city politician), and are trying to rebuild the coalitions that elected them in the past. Danehy didn't pay his taxes on time two years ago, a revelation that may damage his candidacy. Frisoli, who has run front page ads in local papers for weeks, is a rookie councilor fighting to keep the same support he had a year ago. Crane, labelling himself a councilor for the entire city, is the son of Cambridge political legend Edward Crane, a lineage that still garners much support.

Two outsiders, not firmly aligned with either the independent or CCA camps, may also affect the balloting. David Agee and Douglas Okun don't have the ethnic and neighborhood bases that Vellucci, Danehy and their ilk draw on; their support of a "depolarized" city council may draw some votes, though, from new arrivals in the city--for the most part condo owners, who are less a part of Cambridge machine politics.

Analysis aside, though, it's still an uncallable race--on a new track, with new horses and under different rules. Don't bet on anything.