4th Middlesex State Senate special election update:

The democratic candidates so far are:
Representative James Marzilli (Arlington)
Kenneth Donnelly (Arlington)
Representative Charles Murphy (Burlington)
Representative Patrick DiNatale (Woburn)
Virginia Mooney (Burlington)
Bob Peters (Lexington)

So the field has thinned out a bit since last we discussed this upcoming election, the deadline though to submit nomination papers is in early October so there is till room if increasingly theoretical for another democratic aspirant to parachute in.

This is a big field though and it's a 100,000 person senate constituency so everyone has their work cut out for them.
My suspicion though is, there may be some "bone hunters" in the above roster. "Bone hunting" is a venerable tradition in local and national politics going back to the glory days of Tammany Hall. One either fields a roster of candidates or gets into a race oneself in order to get a job or a cash offer off of the deal, usually in return for getting out of the race prompto.
"Bone hunting" is a phenom quite obviously that attends on elections to paying positions and it has hardly gone out of style even today. I know of at least one candidate for the state legislature who was allegedly offered some $5,000 cash to bail on the race by a rival.
The offer was supposedly turned down, why I do not know.
On the other hand, they may all be in it for the policy of legislatin' at the senate level, who knows, the thing about bone-hunting is, it's a process that shuns the light of day.