Can Landrieu pull off a ‘Hail Mary’ in Louisiana?

It’s plausible that on Saturday, the day of the runoff election in Louisiana, more people will tune in to the Southeastern Conference Football Championship game than turn out at the polls to vote for their next U.S. senator. If so, it would be a fitting coda to a midterm election season defined largely by voter frustration and apathy, which in November saw the lowest national voter turnout since 1942.

The Louisiana race became an afterthought almost as soon as Republicans clinched their 2015 majority last month, leaving three-term incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu facing an uphill battle largely on her own. The odds against her winning a fourth term appear formidable: early voting numbers look abysmal for her, 99 percent of the 14,000 ads run by outside organizations in the runoff have been aired by groups backing Republicans, and all of her Democratic Senate colleagues from red states who faced re-election in November lost their seats.

But just as No. 1 Alabama is the odds-on favorite to defeat No. 16 Missouri on Saturday and still could lose, Landrieu and her backers haven’t given up hope for what would be the biggest come-from-behind win of the year. And if she does defy the odds and beat her challenger, Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy, the victory would be all the sweeter for being achieved almost entirely without the help of national Democrats, who pulled money and ads out of the state almost as soon as the runoff began.

“I wish they had helped Mary. She was somebody who has always worked very hard and been a very loyal friend, and so I wanted to repay her friendship by being down there to help,” said Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., one of seven Senate Democrats to travel to the bayou to stump for Landrieu in the last two weeks of the runoff.

“Everybody I talk to down there just wants to see results and doesn’t want to worry about politics, and so she’s done a great job for them and I’m very hopeful,” he said.

Landrieu’s only chance was — and still is — to localize the race and try to energize her base while hoping that Republicans, who already achieved an enormous victory in flipping the balance of power in the Senate, no longer feel motivated to come to the polls.

In October, Landrieu ousted her campaign manager and replaced him with the campaign manager who ran her brother Mitch’s successful bid for mayor of New Orleans, underscoring the importance of the parish to her win and the local focus of the race.

But the enthusiasm needed to get voters to the polls just might not be there.

In the 2002 runoff, Landrieu won despite a GOP-dominated national election (President George W. Bush’s approval was at 66 percent), with 105,780 of 132,660 New Orleans Parish voters supporting her, or approximately 16.5 percent of her total votes. Turnout there this year, based on early voting numbers, is on pace to be lower.

And despite her efforts, enthusiasm for Landrieu could well shrink further now that her key plea to voters — to re-elect the senator who chairs the Senate Energy Committee — is no longer relevant. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, will chair that committee starting in January. Republicans believe that Landrieu has also missed her window to create distance between herself and President Barack Obama, whose approval rating in Louisiana has hovered around 30 percent all year.

“There was a time when every election in Louisiana was a personality election. But this runoff proves that in the world of cable news … every Senate election is a national election,” said Republican strategist Brad Todd, whose Virginia-based firm consults for Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and helped Republicans pick up Senate seats in Colorado and North Carolina. “You just can’t hide a partisan record in D.C. with a pothole campaign back home. No amount of cornbread will cover up even a little bit of Chardonnay.”

In the final days of the race, Landrieu’s campaign pushed hard on a story that Cassidy was overpaid for part-time work he did as a doctor on staff at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center after being elected to the U.S. House in 2008. But it’s unclear whether that story is enough to move the needle for voters, given how staunch their partisan preferences are already. The Landrieu campaign has also not had enough cash on hand to continue to aggressively attack Cassidy on air.

Some Democrats are privately questioning why Landrieu spent so much money in October, when most polling suggested she could win the election outright and avoid a runoff. According to the FEC, she had just more than $780,000 cash on hand on Nov. 16. She had $3.49 million heading into October.

According to a Republican operative tracking the race, Landrieu spent $3.25 million on broadcast and cable advertising in October. She spent an additional $513,000 between Nov. 1 and Nov. 4, the general election day. Since the general election, she’s spent only around $1 million, or a third of what she doled out to be up on the air in October.

Alone on the field, Landrieu could have used the extra cash to try to turn out her voters as the clock wound down. Now, it’s just her, her political family’s turnout operation and one more day. And it might not be enough.