It’s been talked about pretty regularly for a while, so nobody was surprised yesterday when John Fleming put out a press release confirming that he’s running against Bill Cassidy for the latter’s Senate seat which will come up for re-election in 2026…

Fleming has a pretty simple campaign message that most folks will digest and probably not disagree with – namely, that Cassidy is a RINO NeverTrumper swamp rat, and Fleming actually worked in the White House as a deputy chief of staff in the first Trump administration which makes him the MAGA candidate, so really what we’ll have is a referendum on Trump in a closed Republican primary in Louisiana where Trump just got 60 percent of the statewide vote last month.

Which is not a narrative Cassidy will like.

So he’s trying out a different narrative…

“I thought he wanted to be State Treasurer? John Fleming wants to get out of Louisiana. He publicly said he wanted a job in the Trump administration, and apparently, they didn’t want him. So after less than a year as State Treasurer, he’s looking for another job to return to Washington. Again, I thought he wanted to be State Treasurer, but apparently not.”

The comeback to this is almost certainly going to be that Cassidy ran for re-election in 2020 as the Trumpiest Trump who ever Trumped, and two months later he was voting to impeach the president over a protest on Capitol Hill which got out of hand mostly because Nancy Pelosi refused Trump’s offer of National Guardsmen for security.

And almost comically, Cassidy voted to declare what would essentially be a post-presidential impeachment unconstitutional, and then he voted for the impeachment.

So now he wants to trash Fleming for jumping from State Treasurer into a Senate race…because Fleming lacks consistency or something?

Yeah, OK.

It’s interesting that Fleming was the first of the MAGA candidates to get in. He was a contender for a cabinet post, or something just under the cabinet level, in this Trump administration, and that assumedly held up his announcement for the Senate. There was a window for some of the other potential candidates to steal a march on him while he was looking into joining the administration, and yet nobody else got into the 2026 Senate race.

Which is not to say that a Clay Higgins or Eric Skrmetta, or some of the others, won’t ultimately join in. And the guess is that when they do, they’ll make mention of the fact that Fleming is going to be 75 years old on Election Day in 2026. He doesn’t look it and he’s exceptionally well preserved, but 75 is pretty long in the tooth for a freshman senator.

In a head-to-head race in a closed GOP primary, any of the conservative prospects will beat Cassidy as of now. In our last post talking about the race, though, we had something wrong – we noted that Cassidy’s best hope would be to end up with as many of those potential candidates as possible, have them split the conservative/MAGA vote and then run first in the primary.

But there is a runoff built into the new party primary system. So whoever makes the runoff with Cassidy likely beats him.

And whoever that is will absolutely have Donald Trump coming down to Louisiana to campaign against Cassidy, which could be decisive.

However, there’s the money issue, and this is really Cassidy’s only hope.

Bill Cassidy already has $6 million in the bank. Fleming has $110,000 in his state account and OpenSecrets.org shows he’s got about a million bucks in his federal account. Most people think Cassidy will have $10 million before it’s all said and done.

OpenSecrets has Higgins sitting with just under $400,000 in his federal account, which would mean he’s got an awful lot of work to do. Higgins has a ton of goodwill with Louisiana’s voters, but he’s going to need some help – assumedly from Gov. Jeff Landry getting out and pushing. The guess is that Team Trump would wait to see which one between Fleming, Higgins and/or Skrmetta ends up as Cassidy’s prime primary opponent before making an endorsement, so Higgins would want to win the Landry primary as his best bet.

And that’s why it wouldn’t surprise us if he gets into the race before Christmas.

As for Skrmetta, he’d have a nice advantage in that he can pull a good bit of support in the New Orleans area, and anybody who’s heard him talk can tell you he’s pretty stout when it comes to policy. Is he as well known as Higgins or Fleming statewide? Probably not, and that’s something he’d have to overcome. Will he have any money? He’s raised a decent amount in his Public Service Commission campaigns, but the U.S. Senate is an entirely different race from a fundraising standpoint than is the PSC, where you’re raising money from a relatively small community of people who know or care what the position does.

None of which is a shot at Skrmetta. It’s just the difference between having been in Congress and/or being a statewide official, vs. being on the Public Service Commission.

We wouldn’t discount the possibility of a dark horse candidate in the race, and there is a pretty good bench building up in the Louisiana legislature of folks destined for higher office. It wouldn’t be a surprise if one of them got in and made some waves.

But they’re all going to be competing with Fleming for the title of most-powerful-nemesis-and-Trump-avenger. Because what everybody in Louisiana knows about Bill Cassidy is that he made an absolute ass of himself with that impeachment vote, and in a GOP primary the majority of the voters are going to be motivated to pay him back for it.

That’s why Fleming is in, and it’s why Fleming won’t likely be alone.