Julia Letlow, lifted by Trump, wins republican Senate runoff in Louisiana
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
By TIM BALK and EMILY DAVIES
Rep. Julia Letlow rode President Donald Trump’s endorsement to victory in a Republican primary runoff election in Louisiana on Saturday, according to The Associated Press, taking a major step toward replacing Sen. Bill Cassidy.
Letlow’s win over State Treasurer John Fleming, a hard-right former member of Congress, came a month after the two contenders advanced past Cassidy, a second-term Republican who was targeted by Trump for defeat.
She enters the general election race as a heavy favorite in deep-red Louisiana, which has not been represented by a Democrat in the Senate in more than a decade. If Letlow reaches the Senate, she would become the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in the chamber.
Jamie Davis, a Louisiana farmer who tends to some of the same land his grandfather worked as a sharecropper, won the Democratic runoff, according to the AP, and will be his party’s nominee.
The outcome of the Republican race is welcome news for Trump, whose endorsement remains a coveted prize in Republican contests, even after he had some recent losses in primaries for governor in Iowa and Georgia. Seeking to oust Cassidy after he voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, the president had urged Letlow to challenge the sitting senator. In January, he wrote on social media: “RUN, JULIA, RUN!!!”
Trump celebrated the win late Saturday, writing on social media that Letlow will be “a truly GREAT Senator!”
With 93% of the vote tallied Saturday, Letlow led Fleming by nearly 14 percentage points. She thanked Trump in her speech.
“Thank you for encouraging me to get into this race. Thank you for your endorsement,” she said from her victory party in Baton Rouge. “Louisiana loves you!”
Letlow, a former educator, was the first Republican woman elected to Congress from Louisiana after winning a special election in 2021 to replace her husband, Luke Letlow, who died of complications from the coronavirus days before he was set to take office.
She led comfortably in the first round of voting May 16, finishing about 20 points ahead of Cassidy and about 17 points in front of Fleming. But she did not secure the majority needed to avoid a runoff.
More endorsements came after Cassidy’s defeat. Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi all backed Letlow. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, endorsed her, too, calling her a “strong conservative fighter.”
But polls showed a tight race in the runoff’s closing days, as Fleming, who helped found the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, seemed to connect with some voters by arguing that he was the more conservative option.
He focused on favorable comments Letlow made about diversity, equity and inclusion while interviewing in 2020 to be president of the University of Louisiana at Monroe. (She had since disavowed DEI, saying it had been “hijacked by the radical left and turned into indoctrination.”)
“I have a clearly more conservative, MAGA-aligned voting record than she does,” Fleming argued in an interview in the runoff’s final days, deriding Letlow as “woke.”
She responded to his attacks by asserting that she was the true candidate of the MAGA movement, and by casting him as a feckless career politician.
“It’s time for a new generation of Conservative Leadership,” she wrote on social media this month.
By Thursday, Trump again weighed in on this race, joining a virtual rally to reassert that Letlow was the MAGA candidate. In the rally, the president described her as a “great person” and an “incredible warrior for Louisiana’s farmers and fishermen and military.”
“I know Julia very well,” Trump said. “I’ve known her for a long time. And I’ve seen her tested at the highest level.”
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