Well, there is new polling on the three-way tug-of-war between Bill Cassidy, Julia Letlow and John Fleming over Cassidy’s seat in the U.S. Senate. We wish we could tell you that it gives clarity as to the state of the race, but we’d be lying.

It’s very much an eye-of-the-beholder thing.

Camp Letlow is quite enthusiastic about a couple of polls out recently. An email the campaign put out yesterday…

WHERE THE RACE STANDS

Two independent surveys conducted within days of each other now show the same clear picture in Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary: Trump-endorsed Julia Letlow is in first place, and Bill Cassidy has collapsed to third.

A survey by BDPC Strategic Campaign Services, conducted March 16-17, found Letlow leading with 29.0%, followed by John Fleming at 23.5% and Bill Cassidy at 19.7%, with 26.8% undecided.

A second independent survey by American Pulse Research, conducted March 20-24, found nearly the same result: Letlow at 31%, Fleming at 25%, and Cassidy again in third at 21%.

CASSIDY IS COLLAPSING

Bill Cassidy’s standing with Louisiana Republican primary voters is badly damaged. In the BDPC survey, his unfavorable rating stands at 55.1%, including 42.8% who view him very unfavorably. Among registered Republicans, he receives just 19.0% support.

The runoff numbers are even worse for Cassidy. In the BDPC poll, Letlow leads Cassidy 50.2% to 24.2%. In the American Pulse survey, Letlow leads Cassidy by an even wider 54% to 24% margin.

Cassidy understood from the beginning that he had no real path against the Trump-endorsed candidate, so he made a deliberate choice: spend millions attacking Julia Letlow while leaving Fleming untouched, hoping to fracture the field and avoid the matchup he feared most.

Thus far, Cassidy and his allies have burned through roughly $15 million in this race, including more than $8 million attacking Julia. It has not worked, because Louisiana Republicans see right through Cassidy’s lies and have not forgiven his anti-Trump record.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Julia’s path is clear. She is leading the race, President Trump’s endorsement continues to move voters in her direction, and she is best positioned to grow as the field consolidates. Cassidy remains trapped under the weight of his vote to convict President Trump, and Fleming’s room to operate shrinks as Trump voters come home to the candidate the President endorsed.

John Fleming’s campaign has different numbers, of course…

We haven’t seen Cassidy’s camp tout any polls lately.

That fact tells us this could – we haven’t thought this could happen before, but we’re starting to get the feeling it’s possible – turn out to be a Letlow-Fleming runoff. We’ve assumed that Cassidy was going to buy his way into the runoff and then he’d run up against a hard ceiling below 50 percent of Republican voters willing to send him back to the Senate.

But Cassidy has unleashed a furious waterfall of sewage against Letlow over the past couple of months, and so far that seems to be proving one of our oldest political warnings.

Which is that going negative in a race with multiple opponents doesn’t work all that well.

Fleming hasn’t gone up on TV very much yet. Most of the money his campaign has is his money, and so he’s running a bargain-basement operation which largely consists of giving speeches at Republican women’s club meetings and the like. He’s traveling the state on a retail campaign and he’s investing what he’s spending on social media. Not all of it is even helpful.

But he’s coasting, potentially, into a runoff thanks to those Cassidy PAC ads calling Letlow a “liberal” and a RINO.

Those ads are – maybe? – pulling voters off Letlow, but they aren’t going to Cassidy. Voters turned off of Letlow by the ideological accusations are gravitating toward Fleming, if the polling is correct.

Because conservative voters in Louisiana are done with Bill Cassidy.

David Vitter ran into this problem in the 2015 gubernatorial race. He was more concerned with Scott Angelle than he was John Bel Edwards, and Angelle’s campaign was trashing Vitter nonstop, so Vitter spent much of the race hammering away at Angelle and, to a lesser extent, Jay Dardenne. All that did was allow Edwards to coast, largely unmolested, into the runoff, and Vitter was so damaged by the crossfire with the other Republicans that he simply ran out of time to repair relations with the voters turned off by the attack ads.

This happened again in 2019. When Eddie Rispone went negative on Ralph Abraham, it did knock Abraham out of the runoff, but it so turned Abraham’s voters off that Rispone couldn’t reach them and he ended up falling just short against Edwards in a race that seemed unlosable.

If you’re in a head-to-head race, you can absolutely cover your opponent in dung and if you do it with enough panache and wit, the attacks can be dispositive in the race. This ad by John Bel Edwards’ campaign stands as one of the most mindless and ridiculous campaign spots ever run, but it was nevertheless an extinction strike Vitter never recovered from…

They popped that ad in the runoff. Had they popped it in the primary, it would have likely helped Angelle or Dardenne more than Edwards.

But Cassidy’s PAC is dropping ads like this in the primary…

We’ll see how it goes. There’s still a month to go before the primary election. The polls are still all over the place.

But as of right now, Cassidy rightly might be the least confident of the three.