Bill Cassidy's perfect storm?

What a recent Louisiana poll and state Senate election returns in Indiana on Tuesday suggest about Cassidy's chances of winning the GOP Senate nomination.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (image from C-SPAN)

If I were U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, I’d be terrified by Tuesday’s events in Indiana.

A series of state legislative races showed that while Trump’s popularity among the general public is at a low ebb, he remains quite strong among his MAGA base. When he endorses you, it helps a lot. And when he endorses your opponent, it hurts you a lot.

In Indiana, we saw the most up-to-date evidence of that after Trump and his allies targeted a group of Republican state lawmakers who had refused to redraw congressional district lines to create more GOP House districts. Trump punished them by endorsing MAGA alternatives.

At least five of the seven GOP state senators who defied Trump lost their primary reelection bids.

“Sometimes you can vote your feelings, but sometimes you need to vote with the party,” James Blair, a senior Trump political adviser, said after the vote. “As the elected party leader, the President gets to decide which vote is which, and he is always clear and up front about it. Nobody should be surprised about any of this.”

For months now, I suspect, Cassidy has taken some solace in Trump’s sagging approval ratings in Louisiana and elsewhere.

Trump’s still popular in Louisiana, but not as popular as in 2016 or 2024. The chaos and corruption of the past year have taken a toll, even in Louisiana.

So, Cassidy — who Trump has attacked as recently as April 30 for not holding a committee vote on his surgeon general nominee — was probably hoping that Trump’s anger at him today won’t have the same effect as it might have had in an earlier era.

And he was probably banking on the hope that Trump’s endorsement of U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow might not carry as much weight as his endorsements of other candidates in the past.

Indiana is not Louisiana, after all. But the election results there on Tuesday offer strong evidence that Cassidy’s bid for the GOP nomination is in serious trouble.

How much trouble?

We don’t have a ton of independent polling. But a recent survey of likely GOP primary voters by Emerson College (conducted for a Lafayette TV station in late April) shows him in third place, behind frontrunner Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming.

Fleming and Letlow were statistically tied at 28 and 27 percent, respectively. And Cassidy, the incumbent? A miserable 21 percent.

Cassidy will derive some hope from the 22 percent who said they are undecided.

But I suspect the vast majority of those voters have already decided one thing: they’re not voting for the incumbent. They’re just not sure if they’ll vote for Letlow or Fleming — or at all.

That poll also showed that among likely primary voters, Trump’s support remains very strong (83 percent). And Cassidy? His favorables (30 percent) are terrible.

Those likely voters surveyed also said they do not believe they can depend on Cassidy to support Trump’s agenda, suggesting that all his pathetic efforts to crawl back into Trump’s good graces were for naught. All he got out of it was the destruction of our public health system and his own personal legacy of shame.

Cassidy would tell you (it’s what he told me, at least) that he’s counting on a large bloc of non-party voters to participate in the GOP primary and bail him out.

Such voters might be enough to secure him a runoff spot, but I don’t see much, if any, evidence that this voter-switch effort has produced any substantial shift toward Cassidy. (The likely voters in that Emerson College poll included registered Republicans and non-party voters who said they plan to vote in the GOP primary.)

But even if Cassidy makes the runoff, I’m not sure those indy voters would be enough to help him win the nomination in June.

Now, if all this isn’t bad enough for Cassidy, Gov. Jeff Landry made it intolerable for Cassidy last week when he canceled the U.S. House elections so that he and Republican lawmakers could redraw district lines to eliminate a majority-Black district (or two) and squeeze out an extra GOP congressman (or two).

That means many voters will be mighty confused about whether there’s still an election on May 16.

And when voters are confused, they often stay home.

This tells me that the electorate for the first primary election in about 10 days will be smaller and even purer MAGA than it would have been otherwise.

As the Indiana elections suggest, none of that’s good for someone like Bill Cassidy.

This could all be the perfect storm for his campaign — and one that sinks his boat.