Julia Letlow

As Louisiana’s dreary election for U.S. Senate lumbers on, U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow remains the favorite. That would be the case with anyone who finished within a handful of points of winning a primary majority outright, instead of having to endure another round of voting.

In Letlow’s case, she got 45% in the May GOP primary to 28% for state Treasurer John Fleming, her opponent in Saturday’s Republican primary runoff. Based on how Louisiana votes in national elections, whoever becomes the Republican nominee is highly likely to beat the winner of the Democratic runoff and go to Washington.

That’s how the authors of the script she’s following plotted it out, anyway.

Act One: Eliminate the popular open primary and replace it with a partisan primary system designed to allow the party faithful to winnow the field. Check.

Act Two: Find a Republican to challenge incumbent Bill Cassidy for his alleged disloyalty to Donald Trump, and use the new voting system to send the good doctor into retirement. Check.

Act Three: Ride Trump’s endorsement all the way to an easy victory and a six-year term in the U.S. Senate.

Check? Maybe not.

The upcoming party primary runoff was actually designed to keep a candidate like Cassidy from grabbing the nomination without getting a majority of primary votes.

But there’s a twist. With Cassidy already dispatched, Fleming — a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus and a onetime official in Trump’s first administration — is hanging in there.

He’s run a boisterous grassroots campaign painting himself as the truer conservative and Trumper, one that has seized on the emotional opposition to carbon capture and sequestration and taken advantage of Letlow’s sparser record and her relatively low public profile. He’s skillfully focused attention on Letlow’s other big-name sponsor, Gov. Jeff Landry, who is more controversial among the chosen electorate than Trump.

And it might be working. One poll sponsored by a Letlow supporter shows Fleming, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, with a slight edge going into next week.

Also, popular conservative radio talk show host Moon Griffon recently announced that he’s a Fleming voter. He’s not against Letlow, he said, and would definitely vote for her should she be the GOP candidate. But Fleming, he said, has walked the walk for longer and “won’t owe anybody anything.”

Griffon’s nod is actually kind of ironic, because back in the primary, Letlow considered his show a safe anti-Cassidy space and chose it as the only place where she was willing to debate. Cassidy, who’d pushed to meet in a neutral venue, declined, but Fleming happily showed up.

During the runoff, he’s pushed for more debates between the two surviving candidates, but Letlow has refused.

That’s a classic front-runner strategy, a status that Letlow won not through her own efforts to distinguish herself but by her anointment by powerful supporters. The theory is that the candidate who’s far ahead doesn’t want to legitimize an opponent in voters’ eyes, and can only lose support by saying the wrong thing in an uncontrolled environment.

But when the person avoiding the debate might not be such a strong front-runner, it can look less like flexing and more like hiding.

And you’ve got to admit that the person who made her the front-runner in the first place isn’t doing her so many favors these days. Trump, who has shown himself time and again to be driven by grievance, badly wanted to take Cassidy down. Now that that’s happened, he’s not showing a ton of interest in choosing between two proven sycophants.

So has any of this actually upended the narrative? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll know in a week.

One feature of inventing a new election system is that nobody can predict who will show up to vote. Saturday’s GOP runoff, which is only open to registered Republicans and no-party voters, comes at the start of a holiday week, so getting people to the polls will be challenging. And it’ll be extra-challenging to attract voters whose motivation in the first round was to either try to save Cassidy or to channel Trump’s anger and eliminate him.