BATON ROUGE, La. — Most of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Trump after the January 6th insurrection have retired. Not Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — he is running for reelection.
Cassidy's bid for a third term will test Trump's grip on the party. The outcome may also show what voters want from their representatives in Washington in this political moment — and whether a Republican senator like Cassidy can survive in Congress.
Cassidy is facing two primary challengers on Saturday, including one endorsed by Trump, pitting the veteran lawmaker who chairs the powerful Senate health committee against a millennial MAGA loyalist.
For many Louisiana Republican voters, Cassidy's vote to convict Trump felt like a betrayal.
Under the shade of a pop-up tailgate tent at the annual crawfish festival in Breaux Bridge, retired deputy sheriff Kevin Dupree says he would be fine with any of the Republican nominees – except Cassidy.
"I'm the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won't trust you anymore," Dupree says. "I think his political career in Louisiana is finished."
St. Martin Parish GOP Chair Kelby Daigle hopes that is not so. Across the festival, with a lineup that features Cajun music, a crawfish eating contest and crawfish races, Daigle says has two polarizing positions right now. He does not like crawfish, and he is backing Cassidy.
Daigle says Cassidy was right to convict Trump, though he acknowledges that the senator has not always explained that vote well to voters. Still he worries about what the president is doing to the party.
"Conservatism is about ideas and principles, and they always make it about Trump," Daigle says. "What are you going to do when he's no longer in the picture?"
But for many primary voters, Trump is still very much in the picture.
For some voters, Trump's endorsement is paramount
"Trump does so much for Louisiana, for this country, and the one thing he asked the people of Louisiana to do is vote for Congresswoman Julia Letlow, and I'm going to do that for President Trump," says Dustin Jacque Arnaud, a Republican activist in Lafayette Parish.
Letlow is Cassidy's Trump-endorsed opponent. The other challenger is state treasurer John Fleming, a former member of Congress who served in the Trump administration, and has remained competitive with Letlow and Cassidy in the polls. The top two vote-getters will go to a runoff next month if no candidate tops 50% of the vote.
A former college administrator, Letlow won a special election in 2021 for the House seat her late husband, Luke, was set to assume before he died from COVID in 2020.
"What I do know about grief is that if you can find a way to get up every day, get outside of yourself and serve other people, then healing can start to take place," Letlow says. "And I had these two little babies and all of a sudden I was the sole provider, and so God just opened up this door for me to run."
In Congress, Letlow sponsored a bill to collect oral histories from during the pandemic and has focused on education and children. She introduced the "Parents Bill of Rights Act," which would allow parents to review classroom materials like library books and require schools to notify parents if their child requests different pronouns, locker rooms or sports teams.
She also serves on the powerful appropriations committee and has embraced Trump's agenda.
"And then I get a call from the big man, and by that, I don't mean the lord — I mean President Trump himself," Letlow said at a campaign meet and greet at a Lafayette sports bar. "And was asked to run for the Senate."
Until now, Letlow has not faced a serious political challenger. The Cassidy campaign has spent millions on campaign ads trying to label her as "Liberal Letlow," citing her past support in academia for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Letlow says she spent her time in Congress fighting DEI.
Even as Trump looks to build up the next generation of MAGA warriors, Letlow does not attack Cassidy by name in her stump speech. She says Louisiana voters need a senator they can depend on, not one willing to undermine Louisiana voters who overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
"If I learned anything from Luke, you listen to the people you represent and you never turn your back," she told voters as they munched on sliders and wings.
"We have to have courage"
Cassidy is trying to convince primary voters that not only did he not turn his back, but he has delivered for them in exactly the way a senator should.
During a campaign stop with local officials in Denham Springs, he toured the quaint main street, lined with antique shops.
A decade ago, many of them were decimated by flooding. Cassidy says he remembers visiting not long after the storm, as store owners piled debris and waterlogged inventory on the street.
Cassidy helped steer federal money to the recovery, and he says he continues to bring home billions of dollars for Louisiana, including through his role negotiating the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. He notes plenty of his Republican colleagues opposed that measure, only to claim credit for the local projects it funded.
"I'm a gastroenterologist," Cassidy often tells voters. "When the fecal material was hitting the fan, they did not want to be in the front row."
When a woman asked Cassidy recently about his relationship with Trump, he says he told her that while he does not know whether the president likes him, they work together well, noting Trump has signed several bills he wrote or negotiated in recent months, including measures to lower the cost of prescription drugs and crack down on fentanyl.
Cassidy subtly encourages voters to move on from re-litigating the 2020 election fallout.
"If you're about the present and the future, you're voting for Bill Cassidy," he says.
At a Baton Rouge rally overlooking the Mississippi River, where the walls are plastered with "Geaux Bill" signs spelled the Cajun way, volunteers pass out Cassidy stickers with his pelican logo. A flyer that includes a photo of Cassidy and Trump smiling rests at every place setting.
On stage, Cassidy does not mention his vote to convict the president. Even as he presses his constituents to look forward, he also seems to nod at his history of going his own way. "If we are going to make our society, our state, a better place, we have to have courage," he says. "And if we don't, we lose."
Cassidy supporter Leslie Davis has been trying to convince skeptical friends and neighbors to back the senator. She brought one of them to the rally, but the effort has not been easy.
"The very thing they want to criticize a politician for, they're trading off their values to go with the crowd," she says. "I'm not a crowd person. If I'm a parent, I have to make some hard decisions that other people are not going to understand. But you do what you believe is right."
Cassidy says he is at peace with his decisions.
"You make a decision based on the facts before you," he told reporters after the rally. "And then you live with that decision. I learned that as a physician. That's how I live my life."
Cassidy is also trying to court Democrats who see his independent streak as an asset, not treachery. New Orleans voter Eli Feinstein has been a Democrat since he turned 18, but he changed his registration to no party this year to vote for Cassidy in the GOP primary and has tried to convince others to do the same.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry pushed to have the historically open primary closed, preventing registered Democrats who may be willing to back Cassidy from requesting a Republican primary ballot. Cassidy has directly appealed to Democrats to change their party registrations to help boost him.
Feinstein says come November, he will vote for the Democratic nominee. But in a state as red as beans and rice all but guaranteed to elect a Republican, he says Cassidy is the best option.
"He's someone who does not share my politics," Feinstein says. "And I wish that America had more people like him."
Cassidy is squeezed in a vise
Many Democrats do not see Cassidy that way. The longtime physician, for years worked in the charity hospital system and co-founded a clinic for low-income patients, provided the critical vote to advance Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nomination to lead Health and Human Services, despite deep reservations about Kennedy's vaccine skepticism.
And Cassidy's overtures to Trump voters may fall flat as well. Voter Debbie Spinks says Cassidy's support of the Save America Act, a bill Trump has pushed to target election fraud, does not feel genuine.
"Only because it's election time," she says. "Election time they're all about the people. They win, they don't know you."
Former Republican Lt. Governor Jay Dardenne says Cassidy is squeezed in a vice.
"He's got a push from both sides — those who want unqualified fealty to Trump on one side and those who want somebody to stand up to Trump on the other side," Dardenne says at a Louisiana State University baseball game, where Cassidy happens to be campaigning a few sections over.
"Bill is trying to be both things and it may wind up costing him," he says.
That would also mean the Senate has one fewer Republican open to occasionally breaking with Trump at a time when Congress has been more than willing to defer to the president. These members have also tended to be among the lawmakers more likely to collaborate across the aisle on legislation.
Four of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in 2021 did not seek reelection. One of the seven, Susan Collins of Maine, is facing reelection this year, though she did not draw a primary challenge and is running in a state Vice President Kamala Harris carried in 2024.
The other remaining senator from that group is Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. She managed to win reelection in 2022, though Alaska has a unique nonpartisan primary system, where the top four vote getters of any party advance, that helped her survive despite censures from her party. Still Murkowski is the only Republican senator who has been in similar shoes as Cassidy and managed to come out the other side.
"I have just told him, 'Stay strong my friend, you are doing all the right things for all of the right reasons," Murkowski said in an interview. "I think it's hard to say that the results in a race in one state are emblematic of what is happening in the country, but it is undeniable that the endorsement of President Trump carries significant weight."
Dardenne also cautions against inferring too much from what happens in a state with no ethnic majority. Louisiana is about 40% white Protestant and 32% Black.
"Twenty eight percent are everything else: French, Spanish, Creole, Catholics," he says. "That has made our politics, our history, totally unlike any state in America, so we are not a bellwether, necessarily."
Still, Dardenne says most voters are either fish or fowl — they love Trump or hate him. But attorney Will Coenen is neither, the rare kind of voter Cassidy needs to reach.
In between innings, Coenen says he has supported Trump, but worries "tremendously" about the war in Iran. Still, Coenen is skeptical of Cassidy and suspects he will do anything to catch a vote in election season, though the vote to convict Trump is not the dealbreaker for him.
"I care about what they plan to do for Louisiana," Coenen says. "This is probably the most confusing time in politics I've ever experienced. It's a difficult time for voters. I mean who do you trust?"
Cassidy is asking voters to trust him. This election will test not only that proposition, but also Trump's hold on the party and if an endangered breed of Republican like Cassidy still has a place in the Senate.
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