Five and a half years ago after he voted to convict President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was sent packing by Republican voters as he ran for re-election.
Trump-backed Rep. Julia Letlow and Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming topped Cassidy in Saturday’s GOP primary, according to The Associated Press.
With no candidate cracking 50% of the vote, Letlow and Fleming will advance to next month’s runoff for the Republican nomination. And Cassidy becomes the first elected Republican senator to lose renomination since Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana in 2012
While he wasn’t on the ballot, Trump is a winner, as the primary in the solidly red state was the latest test of his endorsements in GOP nomination and of the president’s immense grip over the Republican Party.
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The Louisiana primary was held a week and a half after Indiana’s primary, where Trump-backed challengers ousted five sitting Republican state senators who last December teamed up with Democrats to defeat the president’s push for congressional redistricting in the GOP-dominated midwestern state.
Letlow was backed by Trump even before she entered the race in January.
“Not only did he encourage me to get into this race, but also to have his complete and total endorsement has been, wow, the honor of a lifetime,” Letlow told Fox News Digital on the eve of the primary.
Trump’s endorsement in the nomination race weighed heavily in a state he carried by 22 points in his 2024 election victory.
“It’s the most powerful endorsement in the world,” Letlow said, adding that Louisiana Republicans “are huge fans of the president.”
Letlow was also backed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a top Trump ally.
After cruising to re-election six years ago, Cassidy was one of only seven Senate Republicans who voted in early 2021 to convict Trump after he was impeached by the House for his role in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters who aimed to upend congressional certification of former President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
But since the start of Trump’s second term, Cassidy has been supportive of the president’s agenda and his nominees, including voting to approve Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement were out for revenge.
That’s because Cassidy, a doctor, has been a skeptic of Kennedy’s push to reform the nation’s health policies, including Kennedy’s efforts to cut back on vaccine recommendations.
And Kennedy allies blamed Cassidy, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, for helping sink the surgeon general nomination of Casey Means, a close Kennedy ally and top MAHA advocate, after Cassidy did not bring it to a committee vote.
Meanwhile, Trump blasted the senator as a “very disloyal person” and on the eve of the primary, the president took to social media to praise Letlow as a “Highly Respected America First Congresswoman.”
Cassidy highlighted his record over two terms in the Senate in delivering for Louisiana, which is one of the nation’s poorest states. And he’s showcased his support for Louisiana’s large oil and gas industry, which accounts for roughly 15% of the state’s workforce.
“When people ask things such as, can you work with President Trump, I point out that he has signed into law four bills that I wrote or negotiated,” the senator said in a Fox News Digital interview on Friday. “We continue to work together, by the way.”
And Cassidy touted that he’s “a conservative senator who delivers.”
Cassidy and an allied super PAC dished out more than $20 million on ads, according to AdImpact, a national ad tracking firm. That total was more than Letlow and Fleming, combined, spent.
Some of those ads knocked Letlow over her past support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs during her tenure at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.
Cassidy argued that Republican voters are “concerned about her shifting position on DEI. She was all in for DEI.”
Defending her record, Letlow told Fox News Digital that “back in 2020 whenever DEI was introduced to us, we had no idea what it was back then, and I quickly witnessed it. I was in higher education at the time. I quickly witnessed the left completely hijack it, turn it into this Marxist leftist indoctrination of our children. And so, when I got to Congress for the last five years, I’ve been fighting against it.
Letlow also faced scrutiny from her rivals over her failure to disclose over 200 personal stock and bond trades within the mandated 45-day reporting deadline for members of Congress.
She said it “was a reporting error on my financial advisor’s part. And once I realized that that had happened, I quickly remedied it. It has never happened since.”
And Letlow charged that the criticism of her from Cassidy and Fleming over DEI and stock trading was “all baseless attacks, desperate attacks.”
Letlow won her congressional seat in 2021, after her husband, Luke Letlow, died six days after being sworn into the U.S. House after his 2020 election victory for the seat she now holds.
Fleming, who served as a White House deputy chief of staff during Trump’s first term, argued that he was the most conservative candidate in the GOP Senate primary.
‘They see me clearly MAGA,” Fleming told Fox News Digital, as he referred to Louisiana Republicans. “I served in his entire first administration at various capacities. I was one of the first congressmen that endorsed him in 2016.”
Meanwhile, Fleming claimed that Letlow was “not the prototype for a Trump endorsement. She’s much more like a Democrat.”
The winner of the Republican runoff will be considered the clear favorite in the general election to keep the Senate seat in Republican hands.
