U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy incurred the wrath of pro-Trump Republicans in Louisiana who rejected his re-election bid in Saturday’s party primary election. Instead, voters lined up behind Congresswoman Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming, who parlayed their stronger ties to the president to earn their way into next month’s GOP runoff.
With votes still being counted late Saturday, Letlow coasted to an easy victory but fell short of the needed 50% threshold to avoid a runoff with Fleming.
The winner of that June 27 showdown will meet the Democratic nominee in the Nov. 3 general election.
Jamie Davis, the Louisiana Democratic Party’s endorsed candidate in the race, was just shy of the margin needed to win outright in Saturday’s primary. Nick Albares edged Gary Crockett by 320 to make it into the runoff with Davis.
In his concession speech to supporters, Cassidy took a not so subtle dig at Trump.
“Our country is not about one individual,” Cassidy said in his concession speech. “When you participate in democracy, you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen.”
Saturday’s election was Louisiana’s first closed congressional party primary since 2010, although voters without a party affiliation could choose to take part in the Democratic or Republican elections.
Louisiana’s move to a semi-closed election process, with Trump ally Gov. Jeff Landry as its lead architect, was designed to prevent Cassidy from getting votes from the non-GOP electorate who would have been able to pick his name in the open “jungle” primary had previously used for its congressional races.
Cassidy’s political demise began more than five years ago when he was one of seven Republican U.S. senators who voted to convict Trump during his impeachment trial over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol. The president made his snub of Cassidy official in January when he cajoled Letlow into running with a public endorsement, even before she had declared her candidacy for Senate.
“Bill Cassidy, after falsely using his ‘relationship’ with me during his political career, and winning Elections because of it, voted to impeach me on preposterous charges that were fake then, and now, are criminally insane!” Trump posted to social media Saturday night.
With Cassidy’s loss, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins are the only other GOP senators still in office after they voted to remove Trump in 2021, and Collins is considered very vulnerable in her re-election bid this year.
It was also a particularly costly defeat for Cassidy, who was approaching $10 million in campaign spending as of late April according to the latest available Federal Elections Commission data.
A considerable portion of Cassidy’s campaign cash went into a near-constant stream of broadcast ads attacking Letlow as a liberal. But with Trump’s backing and Gov. Jeff Landry’s Landry’s endorsement, she has vaulted from a relative political unknown on the national stage to a strong contender to claim the Senate seat in November if she can defeat Fleming in June.
“This is not my seat, it’s the people’s seat. Unfortunately, I believe [Cassidy] forgot that when he took that vote that he should not have, and Louisiana did not forget,” Letlow said, referring to Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial.
U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow speaks to the media after qualifying to run for U.S. Senate (Piper Hutchinson/Louisiana Illuminator)Letlow, without any previous political experience, jumped from an administrative role at the University of Louisiana at Monroe into a U.S. House seat in 2021 to replace her husband, Luke, who died from COVID-19 complications just days before he was to be sworn into office. She thanked Trump for his endorsement and referred to him as the “best president this country has ever had.”
Fleming, a physician and former congressman, managed to work his way into the GOP runoff with an almost exclusively self-financed and “MAGA”-heavy campaign. It emphasized his roles in the first Trump administration and leaned hard into his opposition to carbon capture and sequestration, a controversial topic that has split Republicans in Louisiana and nationally.
As of late April, Fleming was matching Cassidy in campaign spending, while Letlow was a distant third.
Fleming was not made available for an interview Saturday night.
Jamie Davis greets supporters at his election night event at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans after placing first May 16, 2026, in the Democratic Party primary in Louisiana’s U.S. Senate race. (Photo by Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator)Although the Democratic ballot featured a roster of largely unknown candidates, voters in their camp were motivated to cast ballots Saturday after seeing the Republican-led state legislature advance a congressional redistricting bill that would eliminate one of the state’s U.S. House seats that favors a minority candidate.
Davis, a Black farmer from Tensas Parish and former member of its police jury, tapped into the groundswell. He ran on a platform that positioned him as a progressive with the ability to unite Louisiana’s diverse citizenry.
“Can you only imagine a candidate from Tensas Parish to carry every parish in the state?” Davis said.
Albares and Crockett, both from New Orleans, ran a neck-and-neck race for second place in the Democratic primary.
Albares received the endorsement of former Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, for whom he worked as an adviser on the state’s expansion of Medicaid.
Crockett, a defense contractor from New Orleans, gained notoriety in the late stages of the campaign when he sued the governor for suspending the U.S. House election that were supposed to take place Saturday.
In the lead-up to the election, the three Democrats hoped to tap into a groundswell of anti-GOP sentiment in his home city of New Orleans.
The state’s Democratic stronghold has been the epicenter of an effort led by the governor, Attorney General Liz Murrill and the Republican-dominated legislature to consolidate its bifurcated court system. One new law prevented elected court clerk Calvin Duncan from taking office earlier this month, and a proposal nearing full approval would eliminate multiple elected judgeships.
Duncan said recent actions from the state’s Republican leaders and lawmakers energized Democrats, which ultimately helped his opponents in the primary.
“I believe when you put more focus on the Democratic voters with the numbers that we seen tonight, I believe if we don’t have the shenanigans in Baton Rouge, I think we win this tonight,” he said.