Lucy Brenton isn’t going to be the next senator from Indiana, but she may decide who gets the job. New polling two weeks from Election Day has Brenton primed to play spoiler in one of the most competitive races in the country. And it could go either way.

Incumbent Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly maintains his lead by a single percentage point over Republican challenger Mike Braun, according to polling conducted by the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Donnelly could win 41 to 40 percent, if the election was held tomorrow.

Those numbers are enough to give activists and politicos and operatives fits. Enter Brenton, and those numbers send everyone into cardiac arrest — the libertarian has cornered 8 percent of the vote in recent surveys.

Destined for a third-place finish, Brenton is now a deciding factor. Both Braun and Donnelly realize the third-party candidate is eating away at the two-party vote. They just don’t know who she is hurting more at the moment. As the Downs Center said in a press release, Brenton looks “to be pulling support from Donnelly or Braun depending on the category.”

This isn’t a fluke either. Internal polling commissioned by the Braun campaign, and first obtained by the Washington Examiner, showed the Republican at 44 percent, the Democrat at 40 percent, and the libertarian at 7 percent.

Brenton has gained attention because both Braun and Donnelly have become predictable and rote. They trade jabs and they stick to talking points pushing their respective brands of businessman and pragmatic centrist. Conventional politics prescribes this strategy. An insurgent approach from Brenton almost ensures that strategy dooms one candidate.

On stage for each of the debates, Brenton was the funny one when Braun and Donnelly were bludgeoning each other with pre-packaged soundbites. “It’s going to be an awfully long evening if we simply listen to them repeat their commercials back and forth to each other,” she said a week ago. It’s going to be an awful long election night for whichever of those two candidates can’t differentiate themselves in the next two weeks.