Julia Letlow

Can anyone stop U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow from becoming Louisiana’s next senator?

That’s the key question that has emerged in the days after Louisiana’s Senate primaries.

Political experts say Letlow holds a dominant position after running first in the May 16 Republican primary with President Donald Trump’s powerful endorsement and eliminating Sen. Bill Cassidy from the contest.

But state Treasurer John Fleming, who finished a distant second in the GOP primary, is not conceding the race to Letlow.

On Thursday morning, he challenged her to three televised debates before the June 27 Republican runoff and said he wanted to discuss issues on which she was attacked during the primary.

Letlow declined later that day, saying in a statement, “It’s no wonder John Fleming wants a do-over after how poorly he performed in the Moon Griffon debate.”

Cassidy issued a call for three televised debates during the primary, but Letlow agreed only to a debate hosted on the radio by Griffon, a Lafayette-based conservative talk show host.

Meanwhile, the two Democratic candidates competing in a separate June 27 runoff – farmer Jamie Davis and business owner Gary Crockett – are expressing optimism about their campaigns, even as their race begins to get contentious.

Davis is refusing to participate in the roadshow that several nonprofits want to organize in the Democratic runoff as they did in the primary.

Davis said Crockett “made frivolous accusations about me and my campaign, to the point that I needed to seek legal counsel.” He declined to provide specifics.

Crockett, interviewed later, said all he had done was call out Davis campaign workers who tore down his signs. Crockett added that he called Davis twice after Saturday’s results to congratulate him but didn’t receive a response.

The two co-organizers of the roadshow – Melissa Flournoy of 10,000 Women and Quentin Anderson of Bayou Progressive – both expressed disappointment with Davis’ decision not to attend the events.

“I think voters should always get as much information and access from the candidates as possible,” Anderson said.

What’s next?

To replace Cassidy, Letlow has to win two elections where she is currently heavily favored. She needs to defeat Fleming in next month’s runoff and then vanquish either Davis or Crockett in the Nov. 3 general election.

Letlow won 45% of the vote in the Republican primary, followed by Fleming with 28% and Cassidy 24%. Only the top two finishers advance to the runoff.

“She has got to be considered the front-runner by far,” said John Breaux, who served as a senator from 1987-2005. “Anytime you get almost 50% in the primary, it’s almost impossible for anyone to overcome that. If I was in a race and ran that far behind, I’d seriously consider whether to run or not, especially with the president and governor (Jeff Landry) against him.”

On Tuesday, Fleming said he didn’t know whether he would compete in the runoff, saying he first needed the results of a poll.

“Are the 24% who voted for Cassidy wanting to vote for Letlow or Fleming?” he asked that day. “We don’t know. It’s something you have to measure.”

He posted the result on social media Wednesday: A survey by his pollster showing Letlow with 45% and Fleming with 44%. The other 11% were undecided in a poll of 640 voters.

“Fleming is tied and surging,” said his Facebook post.

“This is a whole new race,” Fleming said in an interview Thursday. “I think it’s 50-50. Now this is not about removing Cassidy. This is about two candidates for the Senate. One is conservative and has a clean background. The other has a very thin resume, a weak voting record, a liberal voting record. I think when people compare us side by side, they’ll see two different candidates.”

Fleming’s own poll showed a better outcome than a hypothetical survey taken on May 11-12 by Greg Rigamer, a New Orleans-based pollster Greg Rigamer for major lobbyist Alton Ashy. That poll, of 600 voters, showed Letlow leading Fleming, 41% to 35%.

“John Fleming won’t go down without a fight in the runoff,” said Albert Samuels, a political science professor at Southern University. “But he’ll be tremendously outspent, and he has a lot of ground to make up. Letlow has largely ridden the endorsement of Donald Trump. She hasn’t been the perfect candidate, but in the Trumpified Republican Party, she doesn’t have to be.”

Fleming’s path to victory requires him to win over a good chunk of Cassidy voters, even after Cassidy told reporters on Tuesday that he won’t endorse in the race.

Woody Jenkins, who narrowly lost the 1996 Senate race and now chairs the East Baton Rouge Parish Republican Party, believes that Cassidy’s fierce attacks on Letlow during the primary mean that the senator’s supporters will turn to Fleming in the runoff.

“Cassidy spent many millions painting Letlow as a liberal,” Jenkins said. “How can Cassidy supporters turn around and support Letlow?”

That’s not how Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, sees it.

“It’s unclear that voters who previously supported Bill Cassidy would now turn their allegiance to Fleming since he is rightly seen as more conservative than Letlow,” Cross said.

The Cassidy voters might simply stay at home.

The turnout for the primary was 27%. Analysts expect a lower turnout on June 27. There won’t be any constitutional amendments on the ballot or other statewide races. Parishes and towns throughout Louisiana will have millage renewals on the ballot, along with some local races.

The Letlow campaign expresses confidence, noting she led in 52 of the state’s 64 parishes on May 16 and in all six congressional districts.

Fleming ran strongest in northwest Louisiana, an area he represented in the U.S. House from 2009-17.

“Cassidy's coalition was suburban, college-educated, traditional Republicans concentrated in Jefferson, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans,” the Letlow campaign said in a post-race analysis. “In every one of those parishes except Orleans, Julia finished a close second to Cassidy. Fleming was a distant third.”

Letlow has already announced endorsements from U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, the Republican Majority Leader from Jefferson Parish, and from five sitting Republican senators.

Historical parallels

Louisiana elections history does show that candidates who finish second can win the runoff.

Breaux, for example, trailed then-U.S. Rep. Henson Moore in the 1986 Senate race, 37% to 44%, but won the runoff with nearly 53%.

Breaux said he secured the victory by getting the backing of the candidates who didn’t make the runoff. Like Breaux, they were Democrats, while Moore was a Republican.

That strategy won’t apply in this year’s Senate race because that was a jungle primary, and this year’s election is a closed primary.