Louisiana
Sen. Bill Cassidy loses Louisiana primary, and the Preakness Stakes winner is crowned: Weekend Rundown
Sen. Bill Cassidy’s primary loss Saturday brings to an end a two-decade career in public office that was ultimately defined by tensions with President Donald Trump.
Cassidy failed to advance in the Republican primary in Louisiana, as Trump-backed Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming are projected to head to a June 27 runoff.
The result marks another trophy for the president’s collection in his ongoing bid to oust Republicans perceived as disloyal to him.
Throughout Cassidy’s career, there were occasional signs that the physician-turned-politician wasn’t quite in lockstep with his party on a handful of issues, including around health care. But Cassidy’s cardinal sin, in the eyes of the Trump and his supporters, was voting in 2021 to convict the then-former president on impeachment charges of inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6.
Sen. Lindsey Graham says status quo in the Strait of Hormuz is ‘hurting us all’
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Sunday called for more U.S. military action in Iran.
“I think the status quo is hurting us all. The longer the [Strait of Hormuz] is closed, the more we try to pursue a deal that never happens, the stronger Iran gets,” Graham told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
Graham’s comments come amid a pause in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, which have not yet led to a deal to end the war.
Somalia is among the most exposed to ripple effects from the Strait of Hormuz crisis. The East African nation was already facing one of its worst food security crises in years.
Now, poor rains and renewed climate shocks are again pushing harvest expectations down, while global supply chain disruptions linked to the Middle East conflict are pushing up fertilizer and food costs, the world’s leading body on hunger warned.
Notable quote
If they go to war in the Pacific, what you are witnessing now in the Strait of Hormuz is just a dry run.
Singaporean Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan
As the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz drags on, guardians of another critical waterway are worried about the precedent it sets for any potential future clash between the United States and China. The Strait of Malacca carries more than a quarter of global trade, including most of the oil that flows from the Persian Gulf to key Asian markets
‘Meet the Press’
Former FBI Director James Comey said he has “complete faith in our judicial system” as he faces an ongoing federal case over a 2025 Instagram post.
The judiciary is “the genius of our founders,” Comey told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“It’s frankly the only leg of our three-legged stool that is still standing in the U.S. government, but it’s standing tall and straight,” he added. “It is the guardian of the rule of law, and I believe in it.”
Politics in brief
- Ballroom bill: The Senate parliamentarian said that the GOP budget bill, which aims to fund ICE and Border Patrol alongside $1 billion for the White House ballroom, needs to be rewritten to account for jurisdictional issues.
- Gauging the mood: NBC News spoke to roughly 30 Republican National Committee members and GOP activists around the country about how the party can keep control of Congress in November.
- Dropping hints: Pennsylvania’s 7th District has been close to evenly split in recent elections. This year, the Democratic primary is also sending signals about what matters to the party.
On Gaza border, Israeli hard-liners lay out their desire to settle Palestinian territory
A river of Israeli flags winds through a desert path as hundreds of people march toward the border in a display of their determination to build new Jewish settlements atop the rubble of northern Gaza.
Daniella Weiss, founder of the radical right-wing settler group Nachala, sums up the crowd’s intentions.
“We are here on the way to new Jewish communities in Gaza,” she told NBC News in an interview at the border in late April.
“What we did in Judea and Samaria, we are going to do the same thing here,” Weiss added, a reference to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where illegal Jewish outposts and settler violence against Palestinians have grown dramatically in recent years.
Last month, Aws al-Nasaan, 14, was gunned down in broad daylight in the small Palestinian village of Al-Mughayyir, in the occupied West Bank. The boy’s blood still stained the sidewalk in front of his school days after an Israeli settler shot him dead.
Napoleon Solo almost didn’t race. Thanks to a jockey’s suggestion, it won the Preakness.
Before winning the 151st Preakness Stakes, Napoleon Solo almost wasn’t entered in the race known as the middle jewel of horse racing’s Triple Crown.
The horse had competed twice this year and finished fifth both times. It was after the second race that jockey Paco Lopez told owner Al Gold and trainer Chad Summers that there was more to Napoleon Solo’s potential than its most recent finishes indicated.
“Paco told Chad … to go to this race,” Gold said on the NBC Sports broadcast. “I didn’t want to come here. I didn’t think this horse could go this far.”
The faith paid off, and Napoleon Solo overtook favorites Taj Mahal and Iron Honor for the Preakness.
“Paco, it’s you, baby,” Gold said. “You did this. It’s awesome.”
Got maggots? These doctors are bringing the bugs into their practice on purpose
The lowly maggot gets a bad rap, mostly known for feeding on corpses and rotting meat. But modern medicine is giving its reputation new life — as a tiny surgeon.
Polly Cleveland, of New York City, turned to so-called maggot therapy in 2023 when she was caring for her late husband, Tom, who developed sores after a hospital stay.
“You get this little vial with these teeny, tiny little maggots on a piece of gauze,” Cleveland said. “I stuck the maggots in, and by golly, they did their thing” cleaning up the wound.
The thinking is straightforward: Diseased and dying tissue must be removed from wounds in order to prevent infection. To maggots, this dead tissue is food, and they are able to remove it precisely and painlessly.
In case you missed it
- The Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho was locked down Sunday following a midair collision during a local air show that sent two fighter jets crashing to the ground.
- Thai police charged a train driver with negligence after a crash on Saturday in central Bangkok killed eight and injured 32.
- Bulgaria triumphed for its first win at the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, held under the shadow of controversy over the continued participation of Israel.
- A Canadian who was a passenger on the MV Hondius cruise ship, which is set to dock Monday in the Netherlands, has tested positive for the Andes hantavirus.
- A passenger on board the plane that crashed into the ocean off the coast of Florida last week has been arrested on cocaine smuggling charges.
- SpaceX is preparing to launch a new version of its megarocket — a prototype of the system NASA could use to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface.
Bill Cassidy is among seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump after the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
Published On 17 May 2026
US Senator Bill Cassidy has lost his Louisiana Republican primary after years of criticism from supporters of Donald Trump over his vote to convict the United States president during his 2021 impeachment trial linked to the January 6 Capitol attack that year.
Cassidy failed to secure enough support in the southern state on Saturday to advance to a run-off, finishing behind Representative Julia Letlow and State Treasurer John Fleming. The two will face each other in a second round of voting on June 27.
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The result underlines Trump’s continued influence over the Republican Party as he targets politicians seen as disloyal, even as he faces growing political pressure over inflation, falling approval ratings and criticism of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump after the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters who sought to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss. While several Republicans who broke with Trump chose not to seek re-election, Cassidy campaigned aggressively for a third six-year term and heavily outspent his rivals.
On the morning of the vote, Trump attacked Cassidy on social media, calling him “a disloyal disaster” and “a terrible guy”. Speaking after his defeat, Cassidy appeared to respond indirectly to Trump’s remarks. “Insults only bother me if they come from somebody of character and integrity,” he told supporters.
He added: “Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about the constitution.”
Letlow, meanwhile, embraced Trump’s backing during her victory speech. “I want to say thank you to a very special man, … the best president this country has ever had, President Donald Trump,” she said.
She later described Cassidy’s impeachment vote as evidence that he had “turned his back on Louisiana voters”. Trump celebrated Cassidy’s loss online, writing: “That’s what you get by voting to impeach an innocent man.”
The Louisiana race is the latest in a series of contests in which Trump has backed efforts to remove Republicans who opposed him. Earlier this month, several Indiana state senators were also defeated after they had rejected Trump’s redistricting plan aimed at winning more seats in the US Congress for Republicans.
Saturday’s elections also took place amid confusion after a recent US Supreme Court ruling weakening part of the Voting Rights Act related to electoral district maps.
While the Senate primary went ahead as planned, Louisiana officials postponed primary elections for the US House of Representatives to redraw district boundaries. Civil rights groups challenged the delay, arguing it violates both the US Constitution and the Louisiana Constitution.
Louisiana’s new closed party primary system on Saturday left many voters confused and election commissioners exasperated.
Most of the angst centered on the new rules for no-party voters, who have to choose whether to vote Democratic, Republican or no-party on a one-page form called Declaration of Ballot Choice.
Election commissioners reported delays throughout the day from having to explain the new process to no-party voters and then having those voters choose which election to vote in.
No-party voters who checked the “no-party” box found when they went behind the curtain that they could not vote in the high-profile Senate election for one of the Republican or Democratic candidates. To do that, they had to check the box for Republican or Democratic.
Louis Perret, the clerk of court in Lafayette Parish, said one election commissioner was so frustrated that she went home for lunch on Saturday and didn’t return.
“I’ve been here 22 years,” said Diane Broussard, the clerk of court in Vermillion Parish. “By far, this has been the worst election. I’m on a text chain with other clerks of court. There’s confusion throughout the state.”
Broussard and other clerks of court reported another problem: Some people who have been registered as Democrat for years, but who typically vote Republican, showed up not realizing that, under the semi-closed party primary, they could only vote for a Democrat.
“The closed party primary is idiotic. It’s a waste of money,” said Harry LeBlanc, a retiree and no-party voter, after he voted at Lakeshore Playground in Metairie. “I don’t understand why it exists except for the parties trying to give themselves an advantage.”
LeBlanc noted that, having chosen on Saturday to vote in the Republican primary, he will now have to vote for Republicans in the June 27 runoff as well.
“That takes away choices,” LeBlanc said.
Polling stations are open on Saturday until 8 p.m. Many polling stations reported no problems on Saturday.
Early voting from May 2-9 also produced many problems.
In the Senate election, U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming are trying to unseat Sen. Bill Cassidy, as is little-known business owner Mark Spencer.
Three Democrats are on the ballot Saturday in a separate party primary. They are Jamie Davis, a farmer from northeast Louisiana who has the endorsement of the Louisiana Democratic Party; Nick Albares, a policy analyst in New Orleans who has the support of his former boss, ex-Gov. John Bel Edwards; and Gary Crockett, a business owner in New Orleans who spent 24 years in the Navy.
Cassidy held a press conference by phone with reporters on Friday to express concerns about the new semi-closed party primary system.
Cassidy opposed moving from the open, or jungle primary, in January 2024 when Gov. Jeff Landry pushed the change through the Republican Legislature, with the senator citing the cost of having an extra runoff election under the new system.
On Friday, Cassidy warned that turmoil would disenfranchise voters and who would end up not voting.
“As Louisianans vote today, it’s becoming crystal clear that No Party voters are facing a disjointed, difficult process to actually cast a vote in the GOP primary,” he said Saturday.
On Friday, Cassidy noted that then-Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Legislature switched to a party primary in 2008.
“It was a disaster,” Cassidy said. “So after one election, we went back to the open primary, which has served us well.”
Landry initially sought a completely closed party primary system where only Democrats could vote for Democrats and Republicans for Republicans.
But U.S. Sen. John Kennedy and others got the state Senate to amend the closed party primary bill by then-state Rep. Julie Emerson, R-Carencro, who is now Landry’s chief of staff, to allow no-party voters to choose which party primary to vote in.
Kennedy said the change was necessary to allow the state’s no-party voters to participate in the primary. As of May 1, no-party voters constitute about 813,000 voters, or 27% of the electorate, according to pollster John Couvillon, who conducted surveys for Fleming.
William Vandermeer, a retiree in New Orleans, thought he had changed his registration to no-party to be able to vote for Cassidy on Saturday.
But he learned when he went to vote at a fire station on Norman C. Francis Parkway that he was still listed as a Democrat.
Under the jungle primary, Vandermeer noted he could have voted for Cassidy or any of the other Republican candidates.
Adding to the confusion is Landry’s April 30 decision – following a court order – to cancel the six U.S. House races in Louisiana but proceed with the races for Senate, Public Service Commission, state Supreme Court, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and local races.
“A lot of people think the whole election has been canceled,” Broussard said. “Voters have been calling all week about that. There wasn’t enough time to get out the word.”
Perret agreed.
“All the education and outreach efforts that all of us put together seem to have made a small dent but not a big dent in voter confusion,” Perret said.
At 2 p.m., he found only 6.9% turnout of Lafayette Parish’s registered voters, leading him to estimate that the overall turnout would be less than 30%.
The office of Secretary of State Nancy Landry is projecting a 28% turnout, which would be a big drop from the typical 50% turnout for past primary elections in non-presidential, even years.
State Rep. Aimee Adatto Freeman, a Democrat who represents Uptown New Orleans, said she found uncertainty when she went to vote Saturday morning at the St. Joan of Arc School on Cambronne Street.
She said she didn’t see a sign telling voters that their vote in the 2nd Congressional District wouldn’t count. Freeman went ahead and voted anyway for U.S. Rep. Troy Carter.
“We need to go back to the jungle primary,” said Freeman, who voted two years ago against moving to the semi-closed party primary.
Andrew Farnsworth, an elections commissioner at Hynes Charter School in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans, said he and others have been able to reset voting machines for no-party voters who chose “no-party” and then emerged irate from the polling booth that they didn’t have a choice in the Senate election.
“It’s slowing things down,” he said, adding that commissioners began taking extra time to explain the new rules to no-party voters beforehand.
Said Judy Chauvin, an election commissioner working another table at Hynes: “If they don’t change the system before the general election, we’re staying home.”
The power of Donald Trump’s endorsement will be put to its latest test on Saturday, when Louisiana holds primary elections in which the US senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to impeach the president following the January 6 insurrection, then tried to make amends by casting the pivotal vote to confirm Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary, stands a chance of losing his party’s nomination.
An incumbent Republican running for a third term representing a deeply Republican state, Cassidy would normally be a shoo-in for re-election. But in January, Trump abruptly said that the US representative Julia Letlow should run against Cassidy and offered his endorsement, underscoring his continued willingness to seek revenge against anyone in the Republican party who has crossed him.
The president’s campaign to oust a senator of his own party – the sort of thing that was unheard of in previous administrations, but not under Trump – may have achieved the desired effect. Letlow promptly jumped into the Republican Senate primary, as did state treasurer and former representative John Fleming. An Emerson College poll released last month showed Cassidy in third place among likely Republican voters, with Fleming and Letlow neck and neck for the lead.
“This is a primary that is mostly about Trump,” said Robert Hogan, a Louisiana State University political science professor, adding that the president’s spurning of Cassidy was probably the “death knell” for his time in the Senate.
Should he indeed lose re-election this year, Cassidy would join a growing list of Republicans whose political careers have ended at Trump’s hands. Earlier this month, five of the seven Republican Indiana state senators who halted a Trump-backed effort to gerrymander the state in Republicans’ favor lost their primaries. In North Carolina, Republicans are in a high-stakes battle to keep hold of one of their Senate seats because Thom Tillis has opted to retire, after breaking with Trump last year over his top domestic policy bill.
A gastroenterologist who co-founded a clinic serving uninsured patients in Baton Rouge, Cassidy served in the House of Representatives before beating the Democratic senator Mary Landrieu in 2014. During Trump’s first term, he was an architect of the failed Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
His relationship with the president soured following the assault on the Capitol by the president’s supporters, after which Cassidy and six other Republicans voted to convict Trump in the Senate, but the effort came up short. Cassidy later supported a fruitless attempt to establish an independent commission investigating the insurrection, and called on Trump to end his 2024 re-election bid after his indictment for allegedly possessing classified material.
Louisiana’s Republican party censured Cassidy in 2021 for his vote in Trump’s trial, and the senator’s political peril intensified when Trump returned to the White House last year.
Cassidy cast the deciding vote to advance vaccine skeptic Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services out of the Senate health committee, which he chairs. The decision flew in the face of the senator’s training as a physician and his stated support for immunizations, and was widely seen as an attempt to smooth things over with the president.
Trump’s endorsement of Letlow made clear the senator’s effort was insufficient. Cassidy has meanwhile criticized some of Kennedy’s policies as secretary, and opposed Trump’s attempt to have the wellness influencer Casey Means confirmed as US surgeon general, leading Trump to blame the senator for having to withdraw her nomination.
In Louisiana, changes to the primary system probably worsened the prospects for Cassidy’s political career. In 2024, the Republican governor, Jeff Landry, a prominent Trump supporter, worked with the legislature to change the rules of the state’s US Senate primaries so that candidates are nominated only by party members and unaffiliated voters. Ron Faucheux, a veteran political strategist in Louisiana, said he suspected the changes were intended to ensure that Republicans like Cassidy who fall out of favor with Trump have no avenue to remain in office.
“The new primary system is geared to help staunch, conservative, pro-Trump candidates get elected, because it’s geared to nominate them on the Republican side and putting them in the runoffs against Democrats, [who] nobody thinks can win,” he said.
Cassidy’s campaign has acknowledged the difficulty of this year’s re-election campaign, and said their goal is for the senator to finish in the top two of the primary, and advance to a runoff election scheduled for next month.
“The mission is pretty simple. It’s to go out, get as many votes as we can on Saturday and position ourselves well for the runoff election to come in June,” campaign consultant Mark Harris told reporters this week.
Both of Cassidy’s challengers have sought to convince voters they are the president’s choice, with Letlow noting her endorsements from both Trump and Landry, and Fleming’s campaign distributing photos of him posing with the president.
Cassidy has meanwhile focused on criticizing Letlow, saying that the race was hers to lose. Dubbing her “Lib Letlow”, his campaign has seized on comments she made in support of campus diversity programs while interviewing to lead the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Letlow has since publicly repudiated those initiatives.
If there’s a saving grace for Cassidy, it could be unaffiliated voters, whose views have not been captured in polls, Faucheux said. But even if Cassidy makes it to a runoff, the president’s opposition will present a significant headwind.
“My guess is that a runoff would be tough for Cassidy, because even though there’s a lot of personal animosity between Letlow and Fleming in the campaign, I think a lot of their voters would tend to be pretty strongly pro-Trump voters,” he said.
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