Republican Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy lost his primary on Saturday, as voters in Louisiana opted instead to advance two challengers to a runoff election after an extraordinary intervention by Donald Trump to oust the incumbent.
Primary Results
With 98% of the vote counted, the Associated Press reported that US Representative Julia Letlow received 45.2% of the vote in the primary, against John Fleming, the state treasurer and former US representative, who received 28.3%. Cassidy came third with 24.4%. The race now heads to a runoff scheduled for 27 June.
Trump's Role
Cassidy's bid to win the Republican party's nomination for a third term in the deep-red state was imperiled by his decision to vote in favor of Trump's conviction after the January 6 insurrection. Earlier this year, Trump encouraged Letlow to enter the Senate race and offered his endorsement, which has now paid off. Trump lambasted Cassidy on Saturday morning, calling him "a disloyal disaster" and "a terrible guy" on social media.
Cassidy's Response
Speaking to supporters after the result was known, Cassidy made a thinly veiled reference to the president, saying, "Insults only bother me if they come from somebody of character and integrity, and I find that people of character and integrity don't spend their time attacking people on the internet." He added, "Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution."
Letlow's Victory Speech
"I want to say thank you to a very special man who you all know, the best president this country has ever had, President Donald Trump," Letlow told supporters in the evening, flanked by her two young children. "There is no greater endorsement than the endorsement of President Trump. We'll always be singing that from the mountaintops." Invoking Cassidy's impeachment vote, Letlow said: "Louisiana was not pleased with that vote. They took that as a sign that he had turned his back on the Louisiana voters."
Broader Implications
Cassidy's defeat underscores the perils Republicans run when they break with Trump on major issues. Earlier this month, five of the seven Republican Indiana state senators who halted a Trump-backed effort to gerrymander the state lost their primaries. In North Carolina, Republicans are in a high-stakes battle to keep hold of one of their US Senate seats because Thom Tillis has opted to retire after breaking with Trump last year.
Louisiana's Republican party censured Cassidy after his vote to convict Trump, an ultimately unsuccessful effort in which he was joined by six other Republican senators, most of whom have now left office. Cassidy later supported a fruitless attempt to establish an independent commission investigating the insurrection and called on Trump to end his 2024 re-election bid after his indictment for allegedly possessing classified material.
Changes to Louisiana's primary system likely worsened the prospects for Cassidy's political survival. In 2024, Republican Governor Jeff Landry, a prominent Trump supporter, worked with the legislature to change the rules of the state's US Senate primaries so that candidates are nominated only by party members and unaffiliated voters.
