Joe Cunningham had a story up at KPEL’s website yesterday talking about the slow early-voting numbers for Saturday’s runoff between Julia Letlow and John Fleming. The winner of that race will be the GOP nominee for the Senate in the November election, and it is more or less a mathematical certainty that a Republican will replace Bill Cassidy, who was blown out in the primary, finishing third behind Letlow and Fleming.

It appears that the voters are not particularly interested in either of these two candidates.

More than 151,600 Louisiana voters cast early ballots ahead of Saturday’s U.S. Senate party runoffs, according to figures from the Louisiana Secretary of State. That sounds like a solid number until you stack it against May — and then the story changes.

Baton Rouge pollster John Couvillon, who is working for Republican candidate John Fleming, says the early voting pace points to overall June 27 turnout landing around 15% statewide. The May 16 primary drew 28% turnout. That’s a sharp drop by any measure, and in races this tight, who doesn’t show up matters just as much as who does.

Slightly more than half of that 151,000 number were Republicans – only 54,000 were Democrats, and some 20,000 were independents, which gives you an indication that the action is on the Republican side so far. That tracks; in the metro New Orleans area there’s a reasonably hot runoff between John Young and Stephanie Hilferty for a PSC seat and that’s a GOP primary runoff, and additionally there’s a BESE race between Ellie Schroder and Joseph Cao in metro New Orleans which is a GOP primary runoff as well. Those things would drive more turnout than… whatever is going on across the political aisle.

But a 15 percent turnout, if the projections hold, is pretty awful. People are going to see this as a repudiation of the state’s new party primary system for federal elections, when the fact of the matter is that isn’t true at all.

It’s not the system. It’s the campaigns.

Team Fleming says the race is down to the wire…

The Letlow-Fleming runoff was supposed to be a formality. U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow came out of May with 44.8% of the vote to Fleming’s 28.3%, landed endorsements from both President Donald Trump and Gov. Jeff Landry, and has outspent Fleming badly. On paper, this race looked finished weeks ago.

It doesn’t look that way anymore. Two polls conducted by New Orleans pollster Greg Rigamer — both paid for by a Letlow supporter — show the race in a dead heat. A June 15-16 survey of 600 likely Republican runoff voters put Letlow at 40.2% to Fleming’s 38.2%. The week before, the same pollster had Fleming ahead, 40.3% to 37.7%. Both results fall within the margin of error.

Is that correct?

We’d be a lot more convinced if there were polls from some of the bigger organizations that we could see. RealClear Politics isn’t tracking the Letlow-Fleming race, and the major pollsters haven’t done anything with it. There was a pro-Letlow poll which had her up 52-37 on Fleming a couple of weeks ago but nothing much has popped since.

If you think the race is close, we won’t argue with you.

The fact is that a super-low turnout makes Team Fleming look like geniuses. They’ve run a low-budget campaign which is based chiefly on social media, and it’s an angry, anti-corporate, anti-carbon capture thing. It has torqued up a lot of the conservative base, and maybe most of them – Fleming does have a majority of the Republican State Central Committee backing him, and the ones with him are the people it’s impossible to get to the right of.

And it makes sense, because his voting record in Congress was pretty immaculately conservative.

Earlier today here at The Hayride, Nathan Koenig had a piece which went after the PACs backing Letlow, running through the FEC reports and smoking out that Stephen Gele, Jason Hebert and Jay Connaughton are the people pushing her campaign. Nathan’s for Fleming, so it’s fine. But what I’d counter with is to say that Gele, Hebert and Connaughton, not to mention Kyle Ruckert, who was Jeff Landry’s chief of staff and is now also involved int he Letlow campaign, are the people more responsible than anybody else for making Louisiana a deep red state. These aren’t shadowy corporate fatcats, they’re literally the political consultants who’ve been on the ground winning race after race and chasing Democrats out of statewide offices for 20 years.

They’re for Letlow mostly because Donald Trump endorsed her and because Letlow’s camp can afford to hire them. If you can get Jason Hebert and Kyle Ruckert and Jay Connaughton, you go get them.

And it’s strange, because the Fleming campaign isn’t really what you’d call a conservative campaign. Populist, maybe. But Team Fleming is using social media to scream about data centers and carbon pipelines, and it’s…

Weird. It’s weird.

But if nobody shows up to vote, and they’ve torqued up all of their people, then it’s entirely possible this strange campaign could pull an upset.

Possible. Not necessarily likely.

Team Letlow would point to that 52-37 poll, and they’d point to the results of the primary, where she trounced Fleming 45-28. They’d argue that John Fleming has done very little to bring the 25 percent of the vote which went for Bill Cassidy in the primary over to his side, and they’d say the 52-37 number is a lot more credible than the 40-38 number, even in a low turnout race.

And if we had to bet, we’d say that’s probably what’s going on – Greg Rigamer and John Couvillon’s polling notwithstanding.

But if nobody shows up?  Yeah. Fleming might do a lot better than people think.

You’d look at that outcome, if that’s how it goes, and you’d say all those high-priced consultants are overrated.

Except the biggest problem Letlow seems to have is that she doesn’t have much of a story to tell. Everybody says she’s super-nice, and that would be great if all was good in America, but super-nice reads as weakness in 2026. There is that video of her saying UL-Monroe needs a DEI office when she was trying to get herself hired as the president there a few years ago, and that discredits her in front of most of the base voters – either because it suggests she’s a leftist or because it suggests she’s a careerist, and neither are good. She doesn’t have a compelling issue to Louisiana voters which she has a lot of credibility on, so she doesn’t have the ability to base this race on anything other than “Trump endorsed me, so you should vote for me.”

And that reminds us of Eddie Rispone running for governor on the basis that he was a Louisiana version of Trump, except people looked at Rispone and didn’t think he was much like Trump at all personality-wise.

And endorsements from the top are really, really not all that effective in Louisiana. Bobby Jindal couldn’t get anybody elected, John Bel Edwards sure as hell couldn’t, and Jeff Landry is having the same trouble. If Trump’s endorsement can’t carry Letlow to 50 percent, we’ll have to mark this trend.

This ought to be an easy race for Letlow, particularly after she got to 45 percent in the primary. If the turnout is as low as projected and those Rigamer polls end up being correct, we’ll likely look back on this race as one of the strangest and most forgettable we’ve seen in Louisiana in a long time.