The biggest surprise in the race for mayor has been just how unexciting this year has been, given Fernando Ferrer’s aspiration to become the city’s first Latino mayor.

Conventional wisdom predicted a spontaneous burst of Hispanic pride would propel Mr. Ferrer forward if he became the Democratic nominee. This was supposed to be a showdown between the local boy who devoted his life to politics and the Bostonian who bought his way into politics. Instead, a half dozen recent polls show a blowout could be brewing, with Mr. Ferrer’s natural base of Latino voters favoring their favorite son by only a modest margin.

The next five days could witness a Ferrer resurgence that wins legendary status in the annals of American political history. But with Mayor Bloomberg leading by about 30 points in a series of polls over the last few weeks, Mr. Ferrer’s chances for a miracle are diminishing daily.

If there is to be a miracle, his name is Dennis Rivera. He runs the powerful health care workers union, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, and derives his power from a large membership of 200,000 employees – many of whom actually live and vote in the city. Those union members, ubiquitous in their purple shirts, staff phone banks and steer election-day buses through targeted areas. Mr. Rivera’s union stands out as the only large labor group that endorsed Mr. Ferrer, and his considerable prestige is on the line next week.

Mr. Rivera is among the few who thought Mr. Ferrer could pull off this election. Looking back, at least through the prism of the polls, the former Bronx borough president’s third try for mayor hasn’t had much of a shot since the spring. The pundits predicted he would benefit from a post-primary bounce and pull within a few points of Mr. Bloomberg. But Mr. Bloomberg never led by less than double digits once his television advertising blitz began.

The money has surely been well spent. In the spring, when Mr. Bloomberg began advertising, his approval rating clocked in just over 40%. He’s now above 60%. Surely hizzoner has helped the economy in his own special way, with his campaign outlays approaching $100 million – compared to $74 million when he had no history in public life.

Mr. Ferrer hoped voters would hold the mayor’s money against him, but instead the more Mr. Bloomberg spends the more voters say they like Mike. While Mr. Ferrer has tried mightily to make Mr. Bloomberg’s billions an issue, voters don’t seem to care how much the mayor spends.

Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign, or at least his pollsters, deserve credit for this calculation. Many campaign observers – this writer included – vigorously insisted Mr. Bloomberg’s spending would trigger a backlash. Instead, voters accept that Mr. Bloomberg’s personification of the American dream justifies spending the kind of money national candidates shell out in pursuit of presidential nominations.

Many elections see critical moments that define the political climate – whether self-inflicted wounds by careless candidates (Howard Dean’s scream), attacks that stick (John Kerry never recovered from the Swift Boat ads and claims he flip-flopped) or external events that force voters to reevaluate what they want in a leader (September 11th is the most tragic example).

This year’s mayoral race, though, hasn’t feature any defining moments at all. Mr. Bloomberg was in the lead, and still is now even more in the lead. Not much happened in between.

Go back to the beginning of the year. Mr. Ferrer was the Democratic frontrunner. He faced a firestorm of criticism by forgetting he once thought the 1999 police shooting death of Amadou Diallo was a crime. But he never lost his frontrunner status, not even for a moment, and won the Democratic primary outright.

Sure, there was a weekend of intrigue as Rep. Anthony Weiner vaulted from fourth place into second – and Mr. Ferrer for a whole morning seemed in jeopardy of coming inches short of the 40% primary threshold required to avoid a runoff. Two days of intrigue that changed absolutely nothing would be a footnote in any other race. This year, however, we’ll look back on the early hours of September 14 as an afterthought.

Perhaps at that key moment Mr. Ferrer had the chance to pick up some momentum. He collected the endorsements of key Democrats and triumphantly canvassed the city to make his case that Democrats should stick with their party this time around.

But Mr. Ferrer’s message was never quite clear. In retrospect, this problem dates back to April, when the candidate’s longtime consultant left the campaign. Whether David Axelrod was fired or fled has never been fully clear. If there was a defining moment for Mr. Ferrer’s campaign this is probably the place to look most closely, even more than at the Diallo comments weeks earlier.

Four years ago, Mr. Ferrer took first place in the Democratic primary – before losing a racially charged runoff to Mark Green-on the racially charged message of “Two New Yorks.” (We later saw Mr. Axelrod reprise that message in the 2004 Democratic primaries for president, when his client John Edwards talked extensively about Two Americas.)

This could be a winning message for Mr. Ferrer in another election, in another city, in another time. New York certainly isn’t booming for everyone. But with schools now under some control and crime down, all New Yorkers are benefiting from some unusually good times in this city.

Mr. Ferrer deserves credit for recognizing that message might not mobilize voters this time around. He stayed away from talking about Two New Yorks for most of the campaign, only to dredge up the message again over the last few weeks when reverting to previous winning strategies was the obvious move. But something was missing.

When Mr. Ferrer ditched Two New Yorks in the spring he needed to come up with an alternative rationale for running. So far, voters are still waiting.

Mr. Goldin is a host of NY1’s “Road to City Hall,” which airs weeknights at 7 and 10:30 p.m.