Louisiana Sen. Cassidy Loses

By Jim Ellis — Monday, May 18, 2026

Senate

Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy suffered a decisive defeat in Saturday’s Republican primary, even failing to qualify for the runoff election.

Rep. Julia Letlow (R-Start), with President Trump’s public support, finished first with a strong 44.8 percent of the vote against three opponents, falling just over five percentage points short of an outright victory. She will advance to the June 27 runoff against State Treasurer, physician, and former Congressman John Fleming, who outpaced Sen. Cassidy to secure second place. Dr. Fleming finished 3.5 percentage points ahead of the two‑term incumbent, a margin of nearly 14,000 votes.

Letlow carried 53 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes — and potentially 54 once all ballots are tallied. She trails Dr. Fleming by a single vote in Grant Parish. Including Grant, Dr. Fleming won eight parishes, all located within the 4th Congressional District that he represented for eight years. Sen. Cassidy managed to prevail in only three parishes, two in the New Orleans metro area and one in Baton Rouge.

The result marked another impressive primary victory for President Trump. He endorsed Rep. Letlow even before she became a Senate candidate. Sen. Cassidy had been Trump’s top Republican intra‑party target, as he is one of only two GOP Senators on the ballot this year — the other being Susan Collins from Maine — who voted for the 2021 impeachment just days before Trump left office after losing the 2020 election.

Clearly, Sen. Cassidy did not anticipate Trump’s return to the Presidency, which proved a grave political miscalculation. Of course, the Senator will remain in office to serve the final seven months of the current term.

Cassidy was first elected in 2014 and re‑elected in 2020, both under Louisiana’s jungle primary system, in which all candidates appear on the same ballot regardless of party affiliation. He defeated three‑term Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) in the 2014 runoff by a 56-44 percent margin. In 2020, he won re‑election outright in the jungle primary, earning 59.3 percent of the vote against 14 opponents, only one of whom was a Republican.

Many Louisiana political observers believe that unseating Sen. Cassidy was one factor motivating the legislature and Gov. Jeff Landry (R) to change the state’s nomination structure. Analysts have suggested that Cassidy would likely have performed better under the previous jungle primary system, where Democrats and Independents could also participate.

Instead of holding a November jungle primary concurrently with the general election followed by December runoffs for any race in which no candidate reached the 50 percent threshold, the legislature and Governor replaced the system with early closed partisan primaries for federal offices and select Louisiana state contests.

Ironically, because of the ongoing redistricting process, primaries for the US House races were not held on Saturday. Once a new 2026 congressional map is finalized, those campaigns will return to the traditional November/December schedule. As before, any candidate who secures a majority in the November vote will be elected outright.

For the Democrats, Saturday’s overwhelming first‑place finisher was farmer Jamie Davis, who captured 47.4 percent of the vote and topped his two opponents in all 64 parishes. It remains unclear whom he will face in the runoff, as the current second‑place candidate, businessman and Navy veteran Gary Crockett, leads non-profit organization executive Nicolas Albares by only 284 votes with several thousand ballots still uncounted.

In both parties, the first‑place finishers came close enough to the 50 percent mark that Rep. Letlow and Davis enter their respective June 27 runoff elections as virtual prohibitive favorites. Given Louisiana’s strong Republican lean, Rep. Letlow would then become the clear general‑election favorite once the runoffs conclude.

The Cassidy defeat brings the number of open US Senate races in the 2026 cycle to 11 – seven from the Republican side and four from the Democratic column. The next major Senate contest arrives on May 26 in Texas, where Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton are competing for the Republican nomination in what is expected to be a very close finish.