Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) was projected to fail to advance to the runoff in Louisiana’s GOP Senate primary Saturday, according to Decision Desk HQ, ending the incumbent senator’s reelection bid after years of political fallout from his vote to convict President Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) and Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming (R) were projected to advance instead, a major victory for Trump as the president worked to oust one of the few remaining senators who broke with him after the Capitol attack.
No candidate secured at least half of the vote to avoid a June 27 runoff.
Trump has targeted Cassidy for years over the vote, repeatedly attacking the Louisiana senator on the campaign trail and encouraging Letlow to challenge him earlier this year. Cassidy was one of seven GOP senators to vote to convict the president in his second impeachment trial, and one of only three who remain in office.
More recently, Trump has blamed Cassidy — chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and a medical physician — for blocking the nomination of Casey Means for surgeon general, drawing backlash from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and allies of his Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement.
Saturday’s race marked Cassidy’s toughest reelection battle since he first won the Senate seat in 2014. Polling in the final weeks of the race showed a close contest between Cassidy, Letlow and Fleming, with some surveys suggesting Cassidy was at risk of missing the runoff altogether.
Trump endorsed and encouraged Letlow to run before she launched her campaign in January. Letlow first won her House seat in a 2021 special election after her husband, Luke Letlow, won election to Congress in 2020 but died from COVID-19 before taking office.
She quickly emerged as Cassidy’s top challenger, centering her campaign on support for the president and attacking Cassidy over his impeachment vote.
Fleming, a physician and former congressman, has also competed aggressively for conservative voters aligned with Trump. He represented Louisiana in the House from 2009 to 2017, before serving in the Trump administration as assistant secretary of Commerce for economic development and later as a White House aide.
But Cassidy has not gone out of his way to antagonize the president. Asked on Friday why he thinks Trump wants to oust him from office, Cassidy told CNN, “I can’t understand the president’s mind.”
“I’m not claiming the president loves me, no, but you can work with people even if you don’t love each other if you got a common goal,” Cassidy added. “And my goal is to make my country and my state and everybody who lives here better off.”
Before polls closed Saturday, Trump ripped Cassidy and called the Louisiana Republican a “disloyal disaster.”
“Bill Cassidy is a sleazebag, a terrible guy, who is BAD FOR LOUISIANA,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Now he’s going to get CLOBBERED, hopefully, in today’s BIG election, by two great people!!!”
Cassidy was backed by much of the Republican establishment in Washington, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Saturday’s contest also marked Louisiana’s first Senate election under the state’s new closed-primary system after Republican lawmakers last year voted to abandon the longtime “jungle primary” format. Under the new rules, only registered Republicans could vote in the GOP primary.
Cassidy opposed the change, and critics of the new system argued it could make it harder for the incumbent to survive by shutting out independents and Democrats who may have otherwise backed him under the old format.
