Trump-Backed Letlow, Fleming Advance in Louisiana Senate Primary

Five and a half years after he voted to convict President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana lost his bid for renomination in Saturday's Republican primary.

Trump-backed Rep. Julia Letlow and Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming finished ahead of Cassidy, according to The Associated Press. With no candidate reaching 50 percent of the vote, Letlow and Fleming will face each other in next month's runoff for the Republican nomination. Cassidy becomes the first elected Republican senator to lose renomination since Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana in 2012.

Trump is a winner in the solidly Republican state, where the primary served as another test of his endorsements and influence within the party.

The Louisiana vote came a week and a half after Indiana's primary, where Trump-backed challengers defeated five sitting Republican state senators who had joined Democrats last December to block the president's push for congressional redistricting.

Letlow received Trump's endorsement 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 carried Louisiana by 22 points in the 2024 election, and his endorsement carried weight in the Senate race.

"It's the most powerful endorsement in the world," Letlow said, adding that Louisiana Republicans "are huge fans of the president."

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a top Trump ally, also backed Letlow.

Cassidy was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted in early 2021 to convict Trump after the House impeached him over his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump was acquitted by the Senate.

Since the start of Trump's second term, Cassidy has supported the president's agenda and nominees, including a vote to confirm Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement sought revenge. Cassidy, a doctor and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, has questioned Kennedy's health policy changes, including efforts to scale back vaccine recommendations. Kennedy allies blamed Cassidy for blocking the surgeon general nomination of Casey Means, a close Kennedy ally, by not bringing the nomination to a committee vote.

Trump called Cassidy a "very disloyal person" and praised Letlow on social media as a "Highly Respected America First Congresswoman" on the eve of the primary.

Cassidy pointed to his record of delivering for Louisiana, one of the nation's poorest states, and his support for the state's oil and gas industry, which accounts for about 15 percent of the 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," Cassidy said in a Fox News Digital interview on Friday. "We continue to work together, by the way."

Cassidy and an allied super PAC spent more than $20 million on ads, according to AdImpact, more than Letlow and Fleming combined. Some ads criticized Letlow for past support of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

Cassidy said Republican voters are "concerned about her shifting position on DEI. She was all in for DEI."

Letlow told Fox News Digital that when DEI programs were introduced in 2020, "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 questions from rivals over her failure to disclose more than 200 personal stock and bond trades within the required 45-day deadline. 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."

Letlow called the attacks from Cassidy and Fleming over DEI and stock trading "all baseless attacks, desperate attacks."

Letlow won her House seat in 2021 after her husband, Luke Letlow, died six days after being sworn in following his 2020 election victory.

Fleming, who served as a White House deputy chief of staff during Trump's first term, said he was the most conservative candidate in the race.

"They see me clearly MAGA," Fleming told Fox News Digital. "I served in his entire first administration at various capacities. I was one of the first congressmen that endorsed him in 2016."

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 the favorite in the general election to keep the Senate seat in Republican hands.