Julia Letlow launches Trump-backed Senate primary bid against Bill Cassidy

Louisiana congresswoman Julia Letlow officially announced her bid for Senate on Tuesday after receiving a “complete and total” social media endorsement from Donald Trump over the weekend.

Letlow, a Republican, is issuing a primary challenge to two-term GOP incumbent Bill Cassidy, a former physician who once voted to convict the president of inciting an insurrection during his second impeachment trial after the 2021 Capitol riots.

“I know Julia well, have seen her tested at the highest and most difficult levels, and she is a TOTAL WINNER!,” the president wrote on Truth Social, after hearing that Letlow was considering entering the Louisiana Senate race. “RUN, JULIA, RUN!!!”

Cassidy, who sits on the Senate health committee has sought to avoid the president’s ire last year by casting the deciding vote to confirm health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr despite numerous misgivings about Kennedy’s past comments undermining the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

He has since pushed back against Kennedy’s handling of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including at a bipartisan committee hearing in September when the senator accused the health secretary of “effectively denying people the vaccine”, after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved new Covid-19 inoculations but placed restrictions on who would be able to access them.

In a video announcement on Tuesday, explaining her decision to enter the race, Letlow said that in “a state as conservative as ours [Louisiana], we shouldn’t have to wonder how our senator will vote when the pressure is on”.

The lawmaker, who won a 2021 special election after her husband, Luke Letlow, died from complications of Covid-19 five days before he was set to be sworn into office, thanked Donald Trump for his backing and praised his policy agenda.

“Our president is keeping his promises,” she said. “I have fought alongside President Trump to put America first, standing up for our parents, securing our borders, supporting law enforcement, rooting out waste, fraud and abuse that drives up inflation, and fighting to fix an education system to focus on woke ideology instead of teaching.”

In response to Letlow’s announcement, Cassidy said that he had heard from the congresswoman Tuesday morning – when she called him to say she was running for office. “She said she respected me and that I had done a good job. I will continue to do a good job when I win re-election. I am a conservative who wakes up every morning thinking about how to make Louisiana and the United States a better place to live,” Cassidy said in a statement.

The timing of a potential Cassidy-Letlow electoral showdown is notable. In 2024, Louisiana lawmakers approved a shift to a closed party primary system from an open – or “jungle” – system for certain elected positions, including the state’s US Senate seats.

Under an open primary, two candidates from the same party can face each other in a runoff if no one receives more than 50% of the vote in the primary. By comparison, the new system all but ensures each of the major parties has a candidate in the runoff. In his case, Cassidy could only qualify for the runoff if Republican voters vault him to victory in his primary, when the old system would have allowed him to make the runoff even if he finished second to a Republican in a primary in which voters of all affiliations could participate.