Sen. Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial for his role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
On Saturday it could cost him his seat.
Cassidy is up for reelection for the first time since his impeachment trial vote. He faces two primary challengers: Rep. Julia Letlow, whom Trump has endorsed, and John Fleming, the state treasurer, who has cast himself as the true conservative in the race. The top two candidates will advance to a runoff if no one wins a majority of the vote in Saturday’s primary.
The primary is the latest test of Trump’s power to take revenge on Republicans who defy him. Five Republican state senators in Indiana who had bucked the president by refusing to redraw the state’s congressional districts lost primaries this month to Trump-backed challengers, demonstrating the danger that Cassidy is facing.
Cassidy, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, would be the first sitting senator to lose a primary since 2017. His campaign and an allied super PAC, Louisiana Freedom Fund, have spent nearly $22 million on ads, according to the tracking firm AdImpact — more than Letlow, Fleming and their allies combined.
Letlow has reminded voters relentlessly in ads that she is the only candidate Trump has endorsed — but she has not cleared the field. Roger F. Villere Jr., a Republican National Committee member and a former state party chair who has not endorsed in the race, said some Republican voters “still don’t have the comfort level in Letlow that you would think they’d have with Trump’s endorsement.”
“I really think any of the three could be in the runoff and any of the three could win the race,” Villere said.
Fleming, a former congressman who went on to serve as White House deputy chief of staff during Trump’s first term, has cast his record as more conservative than Letlow’s or Cassidy’s. He has become enough of a threat that a super PAC supporting Letlow has run ads criticizing him.
Saturday’s primary is the first that Louisiana is holding since a new state law took effect instituting separate Democratic and Republican primaries in congressional elections. The state previously used a “jungle primary” system in which all candidates appeared on the same ballot regardless of party, followed by a runoff between the top two finishers if none of them won a majority of the vote.
The new system allows unaffiliated voters to vote in either primary. Cassidy estimated that such “no party” voters could make up as much as a quarter of Republican primary voters — but he said that his campaign was hearing from voters bewildered by the new system and that he feared they would be disenfranchised.
“People are calling my office to say they tried to vote for me but they could not,” Cassidy told reporters Friday.
Trey Williams, a spokesman for the Louisiana secretary of state’s office, said the office had conducted an extensive campaign to educate the public about the new system and train poll workers. The Letlow and Fleming campaigns said they had not heard of their supporters experiencing similar problems.
“The guidelines have been clearly communicated, and we fully trust election officials across the state to ensure voters understand what’s required under Louisiana’s closed primary system,” Katherine Thordahl, a Letlow campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Trump was acquitted in his 2021 impeachment trial after the Senate voted 57-43 to convict him, falling short of the two-thirds threshold needed. Just three of the seven Republicans who voted to convict remain in the Senate: Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who fought off a primary challenge in 2022; Susan Collins (Maine); and Cassidy.
Unlike Collins or Murkowski, Cassidy has rarely bucked Trump since he returned to the White House. Cassidy even voted to confirm Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last year despite concerns about Kennedy’s criticisms of vaccines — a deeply personal issue to the senator, a physician who has described watching patients die of diseases that vaccines can prevent.
While Cassidy has avoided antagonizing Trump, he has not disavowed his vote to convict him. Instead, he has tried to persuade Republican voters to overlook it, campaigning on his record delivering for one of the poorest states in the country.
“If you want somebody who works well with President Trump, you vote for Bill Cassidy,” Cassidy said last week in an interview in Baton Rouge. “He may not like me, but he had signed into law four bills that I either wrote or negotiated in the last four months.”
But Letlow said it was clear Republicans in the state have not forgiven Cassidy.
“Even to this day, six years later, they’re still talking about it,” she said last week in an interview in Madisonville. “They’re still just as angry and feel like he wavered and turned his back on something that was very important to them.”
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