Senator Bill Cassidy, Targeted by Trump, Fights for Political Future in Louisiana Primary
Senator Bill Cassidy was standing in line at a Home Depot in Baton Rouge, La., lately when a dialog with a lady in the shop turned, as he usually does in his house state, to his fraught relationship with the president.
“I say, ‘You know, I don’t really think President Trump likes me that much,’” Mr. Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, recounted in an interview. “But we work really well together.”
That could be each an understatement and an overstatement.
Mr. Cassidy, who voted to convict Mr. Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial and who drew the ire of the “Make America Healthy Again” motion for his sturdy advocacy for vaccines, is now in the combat of his political life, largely due to the notion that he’s insufficiently loyal to the president.
To a lot of his right-wing detractors, together with the president, Mr. Cassidy dedicated the gravest attainable with out when he was considered one of seven GOP senators to vote to seek out Mr. Trump responsible of inciting an revolt for the pro-Trump riot on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
That choice precipitated a serious break between Mr. Cassidy, who spent six years in the House and has been a senator since 2015, and different Republicans in his state. It additionally triggered years of animosity and insults from Mr. Trump, who labeled Mr. Cassidy a “total flake” and endorsed a Republican congresswoman, Julia Letlow, to unseat him.
On Saturday, voters in Louisiana will take step one in deciding whether or not to hold out Mr. Trump’s want, casting their ballots in a Republican main that has been completely outlined by which candidate most intently adheres to the president’s ideology.
Mr. Cassidy’s combat for political survival has supplied a vivid portrait of a Republican’s wrestle to keep up some semblance of independence in a celebration that now prizes fealty to Mr. Trump above all else. A gastroenterologist who proudly led a vaccination marketing campaign in Louisiana, Mr. Cassidy put his appreciable reservations apart final 12 months and backed the affirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, as well being secretary.
But the motion has not earned him any good will from the president and has did not thank him with the MAHA motion, which has invested heavily in defeating Mr. Cassidy. His choice can also have alienated centrists who would possibly in any other case have been inclined to again him.
“I haven’t met that many people who are excited to go vote for him,” mentioned Lionel Rainey III, a Republican strategist primarily based in Louisiana. “He’s like a man with no country and a man with no party.”
The main is extensively anticipated to go to a runoff election subsequent month. Under state legislation, if no candidate in the race receives above 50 % of the votes, the highest two will advance. Recent polls have been inconsistent, however they’ve prompt that no candidate is prone to win a majority of votes, and that Mr. Cassidy’s progress is much from assured.
Such an consequence would have as soon as been unthinkable for an incumbent Republican senator who has a deeply conservative voting document, an influential perch in Washington, a big fund-raising benefit and a historical past of delivering authorities funding to his state.
But Mr. Cassidy’s prime two rivals — Ms. Letlow and John Fleming, the state treasurer — have drawn on the seed that Mr. Cassidy’s impeachment vote planted 5 years in the past to argue that the senator can not correctly characterize Republican pursuits in Washington.
“Louisiana is still not forgetting that, and they still hold it against him. And to be honest with you, he’s not helped himself,” Mr. Fleming mentioned at a Republican occasion at a Baton Rouge cafe this week. “He’s never apologized for it. He never said he was wrong.”
Mr. Cassidy, who received his seat by relentlessly hammering a Democratic incumbent over his help for Obamacare, has bristled at the concept one vote ought to outline him politically.
“If someone is fixed on events from five years ago, six years ago, they’re not thinking about the present and the future of our state,” he mentioned on Thursday at an occasion in Lafayette, La. “This race is about the present and the future.”
On Friday, at a taking pictures vary in Baton Rouge, Mr. Cassidy wouldn’t say whether or not he regretted his vote, describing his decision-making course of as a product of his medical coaching.
“You’re taught to serve people, you’re taught to listen to them, figure out what the issue is, digest it, observe, and then come up with an answer,” he mentioned moments after firing a .300 caliber rifle. “You could probably look at, like, almost everything I’m doing, and you’d say, ‘There’s a doctor.’”
The Louisiana Senate main is considered one of a number of high-profile races unfolding throughout the nation which can be testing whether or not there’s nonetheless a spot in Republican politics for unbiased leaders who’ve clashed with Mr. Trump.
The president and his political operation have equally focused Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky libertarian who’s Mr. Trump’s most vocal Republican critic in the House, and threatened state legislators who’ve buckled his calls for on redistricting.
But whereas Mr. Massie appears to relish his place as a MAGA pariah, Mr. Cassidy, the chairman of the Senate’s well being committee, has spent Mr. Trump’s second time period attempting to burnish his conservative credentials.
The senator has usually pointed to his voting document in Congress, repeatedly highlighting that Mr. Trump has signed a sequence of payments he sponsored or mega-bills that embody provisions he championed.
His supporters argue that Mr. Cassidy has a confirmed historical past of delivering for his constituents. “I believe he’s a man of honor,” mentioned Dr. William Schumacher, 72, of Lafayette.
But a lot of Mr. Cassidy’s critics have argued that his makes an attempt to curry favor with Mr. Trump and his base had been one other type of betrayal.
After agonizing over the move for weeksMr. Cassidy reluctantly backed Mr. Kennedy to take the helm on the Department of Health and Human Services. That uneasy embrace did little to heal the rupture with the president, and it didn’t last. Mr. Kennedy lately blasted Mr. Cassidy after the secretary’s favored decide for surgeon basic stalled, and his political allies in the “Make America Healthy Again” motion have thrown their help behind Ms. Letlow.
Mr. Cassidy’s vote for Mr. Kennedy might have value him backing from the extra reasonable voters he wants to hold on to his seat. Rather than its traditional open main in which the highest two contenders advance no matter celebration affiliation, Louisiana has switched to a closed system in which Republicans and Democrats compete separately.
Mr. Cassidy’s marketing campaign believes that unaffiliated votes usually tend to again him than Ms. Letlow or Mr. Fleming and have sought their help. Fifteen % of ballots forged in the state’s early voting interval got here from what the state calls “no party” voters.
At the identical time, Mr. Cassidy and his marketing campaign have been working feverishly to persuade Republican voters that he can greatest carry the state’s conservative mantle.
That effort was on show on Thursday in Lafayette, the place Mr. Cassidy appeared with a distinguished anti-abortion political group to focus on his document on that problem.
Mr. Cassidy and the highest high-dollar political motion committee supporting him have additionally spent $21 million on ads, in line with AdImpact, an advert monitoring agency. Many of these spots have attacked Ms. Letlow, a three-term congresswoman, as insufficiently conservative due to feedback she made as she was interviewing to change into the president of the University of Louisiana at Monroe in 2020.
At the time, Ms. Letlow, then a college official, praised range, fairness and inclusion initiatives which have been excoriated by Mr. Trump. Ms. Letlow prompt that the college’s lack of range in its college was “shameful” and mentioned she would goal to rent extra various senior employees.
Those criticisms have sowed questions amongst conservative voters and will hinder Ms. Letlow’s push to win the state’s main outright.
Over a dinner buffet with slices of pecan pie and cake at a gathering of Republican ladies in Lafayette on Wednesday, one attendee pressed Ms. Letlow on her stance on DEI
Ms. Letlow, who has spent weeks sharpening her response, mentioned that DEI had been “hijacked by the left” and that she had “fought against it ever since.”
She has argued that she has reliably voted to advance conservative priorities since coming to Congress.
Louisiana voters “want someone who won’t turn their back on the voters that they represent,” she mentioned in an interview. “They know that they can depend on me to do that.”
