As a two-term Republican incumbent in a Deep South state, with a conservative record and plenty of campaign money, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana should be cruising to re-election this fall. But Cassidy is in danger of losing his party’s nomination in Saturday’s primary election because he was one of the seven Republican senators who voted guilty when President Donald Trump was impeached after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. And Trump has an insatiable thirst for retribution.
Cassidy has a dilemma, or as some people in Louisiana might say, he’s in a trick bag. He wants the state’s conservative voters to forgive him and see him as a reliable ally of Trump, and he needs voters opposed to Trump to see him as their best option. And he’s got to pull off that balancing act under a new partisan primary that didn’t exist during his previous two runs for the Senate.
He wants the state’s conservative voters to forgive him, and he needs voters opposed to Trump to see him as their best option.
As much as Trump supporters may consider his vote to convict Trump a deal-breaker, his vote that helped install Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary is just as offensive to people who don’t support Trump.
Cassidy is a physician who has long touted the lifesaving importance of vaccines. Not only that, but after years of working at a Louisiana hospital for the poor and uninsured, he launched a vaccination program to better protect those vulnerable patients from disease.
Even so, he gave his blessing to the nation’s best-known anti-vaccine fanatic and elevated him to a Cabinet position. That’s likely the worst decision he’s ever made as a doctor or a politician, but it was obviously part of his ongoing effort to mitigate the political costs of doing the right thing in Trump’s America.
Louisiana elections have long been nonpartisan affairs in which all candidates run on one ballot regardless of party. But Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, a Trump ally, pushed the Louisiana Legislature this year to adopt congressional party primaries, with no cross-party voting. That means that unlike in years past, in Saturday’s primary only voters registered as Republicans or voters registered as “no party” can vote for Cassidy.
Progressive journalist Robert Mann, a former spokesperson for Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Sen. John Breaux and Sen. Russell Long and a former professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication, reported that Cassidy reached out to him early last month to make the case that he is the most moderate candidate in the GOP field — and that Democrats should consider leaving their party to vote for him because the winner of the GOP primary is all but certain to win this fall’s general election in what is now a reliably red state.
It’s true that a Republican is all but guaranteed to win. The question is whether the argument has swayed enough die-hard Louisiana Democrats to switch parties, at least temporarily, ahead of Saturday’s primary, and whether there are enough Louisiana Republicans sufficiently disaffected by Trump’s outrages that they will vote for Cassidy.
Mann, for his part, has repeatedly excoriated Cassidy for supporting Kennedy’s nomination, and it doesn’t appear that he’s missed any opportunity to link news stories about various measles outbreaks to what he calls Cassidy’s political cowardice. And yet, Mann said, Cassidy contacted him in his attempt to appeal to Democrats.
But Cassidy hasn’t made that appeal only to Mann. “If you’re a Democrat who has been voting Republican for a while, you’re not going to be able to vote unless you change to ‘no party’ or Republican,” Cassidy told a radio audience in Shreveport in March, according to The Advocate.
Still, even as he’s been seeking help from Democrats, he’s been attacking one of his Republican opponents, Rep. Julia Letlow, a Republican from Northeast Louisiana, over her past embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion and other supposedly liberal policies. Letlow has now disavowed DEI, but Kennedy and the other Republican in the race, State Treasurer John Fleming, have cast negative attention on a recently surfaced video. It shows Letlow enthusiastically and convincingly calling for development of DEI programs — anathema to the MAGA faithful — as she is interviewed in 2020 for the presidency of her alma mater, the University of Louisiana at Monroe. (She didn’t get the job.)
Trump has endorsed Letlow in the primary, her chief qualification being that she’s not Bill Cassidy.
All three major Republican candidates are fervently courting Louisiana’s pro-Trump vote despite Trump’s myriad failures — moral, political and economic. For example, inflation is on the rise and gasoline costs more than $4 a gallon thanks to Trump’s ill-advised war against Iran.
Polls show Cassidy, Letlow and Fleming in a tight race. That’s not a good sign for an incumbent.
But it wouldn’t be tight at all if not for Cassidy doing the right thing and voting to convict Trump six years ago. “Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person,” Cassidy said then. “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.”
He probably never dreamed that five years later, he’d be running TV ads showing side-by-side pictures of himself and Trump.
Kevin McGill is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who has written and reported on Louisiana government, politics and culture since 1978. He retired from full time journalism in 2025 after 41 years with The Associated Press. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, Angie, and writes regularly about public affairs on Substack, https://substack.com/@kevinmcgill3