That’s what WAFB-TV’s political guru Jim Engster thinks Cassidy has to do if he wants to survive next year’s Louisiana GOP Senate primary…

WAFB political analyst Jim Engster suggests Cassidy’s efforts may not be enough.

“If I were advising Sen. Cassidy, which I’m not, I’d suggest he apologize to Donald Trump and admit he made a mistake,” Engster said. “He’s voted for all of Trump’s nominees, but Republican voters have long memories. They don’t view him favorably because they love Donald John Trump.”

Is Engster’s advice sound?

At this point we’re unconvinced.

The problem is that the time when Cassidy could have repaired the damage he did when he voted with Chuck Schumer and the Deep State on a post-presidential impeachment for Trump having asked people to lawfully and peacefully protest at the U.S. Capitol over a corruptly-run and botched 2020 presidential election has passed.

He needed to have made that retraction and apology two years ago. Even then it would probably have been late.

But Cassidy might have been able to make it work if he’d gone out of his way to question the corporate media narrative that a horde of revolutionaries declared war on “our democracy” that day and tried to overthrow the government.

Cassidy could, for example, have joined with Rep. Clay Higgins in scrutinizing how much federal law enforcement involvement there was in turning the Capitol protest into a riot.

Let’s remember what was supposed to happen on Jan. 6, 2021 but didn’t – Rep. Mike Johnson was going to lay out a case in front of the world not that the 2020 election was stolen but that several swing states violated their own state laws in how it was run. The American people have still not seen a full recitation of all of the irregularities committed in conducting the 2020 election; it’s awfully convenient that protesters were let in – led in, in fact – to the Capitol building and interrupted Johnson’s presentation before he even had a chance to give it.

If Bill Cassidy has ever even commented on that, much less expressed reservations about how the events of Jan. 6, 2021 put off a Reichstag Fire smell, we’ve not seen it.

The rest of Louisiana’s congressional delegation, or most of it at least, have made statements to the effect that what happened on Jan. 6 was not quite what the official narrative told us. Cassidy has never moved in that direction.

So for him to apologize now is going to accomplish, what exactly?

Every Republican voter in the state is going to know exactly what he’s doing and why. They’ll know it isn’t sincere.

This is the box Cassidy is in. He already showed himself to be an establishment drone of the pre-Trump style, and he showed himself to be willing to stick the knife in Trump whenever he thought he could get away with it.

He made his bet, and he bet wrong.

I’m not saying Cassidy can’t win. But I will say that the JMC Analytics poll that John Fleming has been touting for a couple of weeks now which has him beating Cassidy 36-29 in a head-to-head matchup is probably not out of line with reality.

Cassidy’s numbers aren’t good. And now that Eric Skrmetta and Blake Miguez, two other MAGA conservatives who might have more political chops than Fleming (as we’ve written, Fleming’s campaign tends to step on rakes a lot), are in the race, it’s less likely that Cassidy can capitalize on his opponents making blunders.

I think he’s going to have to have help from his opponents if he’s going to survive that primary. He’s going to need to get very close to 50 percent in the first round or else he’s done for in the runoff as the anti-Cassidy people galvanize around one of the three opponents.

Cassidy is going to get asked about that impeachment vote again and again. It’s a problem that won’t go away. And apologizing for it now is just going to look like self-serving groveling in front of the voters. Refusing to apologize for it paints Cassidy as a Lisa Murkowski-style RINO who’ll stab Trump in the back at his next opportunity.

This could go away only if Trump endorses Cassidy. That isn’t likely to happen. What Trump is likely to do is keep his powder dry on the Louisiana Senate race until he sees Miguez, Skrmetta or Fleming in a position to win the runoff, and then he’ll endorse the challenger late for maximum effect. If all three challengers collapse, Trump won’t do anything at all.

Because Trump is going to need Cassidy’s vote in the Senate between now and January of 2027, and so he’ll have to manage Cassidy.

Everybody knows this. And it’s one more reason Republican voters don’t really want to hear Cassidy’s apology. They’d rather have somebody they can actually trust, and he’s already showed them he’s not that guy.

It simply doesn’t work anymore. And I don’t think he can fix it no matter what he does.