As we enter the month of February, and the filing deadline for the 2026 U.S. Senate race in Louisiana is rapidly approaching, and with the Democratic Party essentially a non-factor within the competition, the general factions that will come to shape the race have generally calcified.
On one side, you have the incumbent, Bill Cassidy. Cassidy, who took office in 2014 whilst riding the wave of Obamacare backlash, faced little competition from his fellow Republicans during his first two electoral campaigns, and was able to position himself as a staunch conservative, albeit one who was willing to collaborate on bipartisan projects.
However, one bad call is all it takes to ruin years of goodwill.
Five years and a vote to impeach later, and the sharks smell blood in the water. Cassidy faces a field of zealous Trump loyalists, ready to deliver the long-awaited consequences for that ill-advised move.
Rep. Julia Letlow came in late in the game, but she came in with perhaps the biggest prize of all: the big man’s precious endorsement. Trump extended that golden carrot before she had even entered the race, likely reasoning that her multimillion-dollar war chest as a member of the U.S. House was the best shot at outpacing Cassidy’s own deep pockets.
Following behind her is John Fleming, current state treasurer, original frontrunner, and long-time fixture on the hard right. A founder of the Freedom Caucus, the furthest-right segment of Congress, he proudly boasts on his website that he was “MAGA before MAGA was cool.”
When I look at the state of this race and the options proffered to the Louisiana voter, it fills me with a great disappointment.
I do, to some extent, feel grateful that we at least have the opportunity to truly make a decision. Driving through Mississippi a couple of years ago during the campaign of Sen. Roger Wicker was truly saddening, with a bevy of signs scattered around without even the slightest hint of opposition. At the very least, our Republican Party is not a monolithic juggernaut simply dispensing marching orders from within without question.
However, when you truly assess the candidates before you, how much choice do you really have? The phrase “moderate Republican” is frequently thrown around in American politics, and Bill Cassidy has somehow fallen within those ranks.
What really is a moderate Republican?
Terms like conservative or liberal may be vague, but they at least have definable characteristics. What is “moderatism?”
Is it simply your willingness to break with general party norms? Senators like Joe Manchin and John McCain earned their status as moderates by leveraging power to truly disrupt their own party’s agenda and shape it to their end. Manchin used power as a swing vote in a tied Congress to kill Biden’s Build Back Better plan, whilst McCain broke with his party to save Obamacare in 2017.
What true moderate bona fides does Cassidy have to stand on? Overall, Cassidy holds a lifetime rating of 62% with the Heritage Foundation, one of the pre-eminent conservative think tanks, and his session rating usually matches fairly closely with the overall Republican average.
That is, to say, whenever the Republican Party needs him, he falls in line.
He has used the current session to meekly complain about aspects of the Trump administration like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine policy or ICE’s overzealousness before always falling in line and voting with the party winds. As Trumpism has overtaken the party, Cassidy has continued to boldly vote however he is told.
The Senate race this year is truly no battle over ideology. Cassidy is not the “centrist,” and Letlow is not the “far-righter.” Even Trump avoided criticizing Cassidy for anything specific in his endorsement of Letlow.
No, this Senate race is merely a question of how sycophantically loyal Louisiana is to be for the foreseeable future to the vision and actions of one man: the president.
The Senate is the final institution standing in his way. That’s the lesson he learned from his first term. For a president obsessed with quick, blunt action, the old “cooling saucer,” a name given to the Senate by George Washington, must drive him mad.
This time around, Trump has determined that if the Senate will not come to him, he will have to take it. Even those senators who had tried to fall in line to avoid the hammer are not safe.
Louisiana voters, I’ll end with this: Senate terms are six years long, while Trump has less than three left — barring any alterations to the process. Voting for a loyalist now commits you to the wills and whims of a movement and a man for whom the future is incredibly unclear.
Gordon Crawford is a 20-year-old political science major from Gonzales, La.
