I hope I’ve made a couple of things clear so far in the things I’ve written about the 2026 Senate race in Louisiana, a topic which is likely to fill up this site in the coming months as more entrants kick off their campaigns and the race takes shape.

The first thing is that I’d like somebody else to be Louisiana’s senator after next year. Bill Cassidy has had two terms and while he isn’t a RINO on the order of a Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski, he’s also a very questionable vote from the standpoint of someone with a MAGA, or as I prefer to call myself, a revivalist rather than old-school conservative mindset.

Cassidy’s an establishment Republican. Here and there he’s for reform and his legislative record isn’t bereft of positives, but he usually has to be dragged along on the big things.

For example, he’s now claiming credit for having supported Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services. But everybody knows Cassidy wasn’t on board with Kennedy, nor was he particularly supportive of the MAHA agenda. He voted to confirm Kennedy because if he didn’t that vote would have been wrapped around his neck like a rope.

Which is something Cassidy can’t afford, thanks to another vote that’s wrapped around his neck and strangling him – the one he made in the stupid, unconstitutional post-presidential impeachment of Donald Trump in 2021.

That last one is disqualifying, in my view. I’ve written a ton about it; I don’t need to make that case again here.

So I want somebody to come along and earn his or her way past Cassidy in the GOP primary for that Senate seat next year.

The second thing is that while I wish he was younger, I’m supportive of the idea of John Fleming as the victor of a GOP primary runoff over Cassidy next year. Fleming’s record is that of a faithful conservative across the board and I doubt I’d find many votes of his in the Senate that I would dislike.

If it’s Fleming vs. Cassidy, I’m with Fleming.

But now that Blake Miguez is running, and especially with Miguez showing some major fundraising chops, it’s no longer a question of Fleming vs. Cassidy. It’s now a question of “who’s going to be in the runoff with Cassidy?”

And that means evaluating performance.

Because what can’t happen is someone soaks up enough support in the primary to make the runoff and then implodes when up against Cassidy’s $9 million war chest.

I don’t like Cassidy’s brand of Republicanism, but I’m not delusional. His campaign is going to be competent. They will pounce on mistakes that are made and they have resources to make those attacks stick.

So last week, campaign finance reports came out, and Cassidy showed $9 million in the bank along with more than $2 million raised in the second quarter. The $2 million number was inflated a bit, as a half-million of it was PAC money being moved around, but even so, it’s still money Cassidy’s camp has trailed in.

Fleming showed around $2.1 million, which would be a pretty good number except for the fact that all but $115,000 of it is a loan he’s making to his campaign of money he evidently isn’t planning to spend. We can say that because he’s putting that money in and taking it out in a manner which amounts to churning it in an effort to make the finance reports look better than they are. And in the second quarter, Fleming spent about $60,000 more than he made.

This far out in a campaign cycle you can’t be spending more money than you’re bringing in. That’s a really bad showing.

And when a couple of days later, Miguez filed his first campaign report and showed that he’d raised $800,000 in two weeks after getting into the race in mid-June, things got put into perspective.

Meaning that Miguez is clearly a Tier One candidate. He’s showing that he can convince people with money to support him against Cassidy, and his electoral record is such that he’s able to win in big money races. The better part of a million dollars was spent trying to stop Miguez from winning that state senate seat in New Iberia, and it didn’t matter – he steamrolled Hugh Andre by nearly 2 to 1.

And because Miguez presents tough competition for the spot opposite Fleming in the runoff of next year’s GOP primary, Fleming is going to have to run a good race. This matters, because, again, it’s going to take somebody with real political chops to knock out an incumbent with $9 million in the bank.

Is Fleming showing real political chops?

No.

The day after The Center Square’s Nolan McKendry reported, in a post we picked up here at The Hayride because it was newsworthy, that Cassidy’s camp was beating Fleming up over churning his campaign finances, we suddenly saw this all over Facebook…

He’s attacking this site, and also the Louisiana Freedom Caucus, because there was another post on the site last week talking about carbon capture and how it’s a valid conservative cause to fight the government-sponsored Green New Deal boondoggles carbon capture represents.

Which is outright weird.

I posted a response on my page which said this…

John Fleming is an original member of the House Freedom Caucus.

Now he’s trashing members of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus, and paying Mark Zuckerberg to boost it, for taking a position he says he favors.

I don’t know if I’ve seen something dumber than this. Ever.

If you’re on John Fleming, you might reconsider. This isn’t what winning candidates do.

It’s not that he hurt my feelings. It’s that there is zero percentage in John Fleming attacking Louisiana Freedom Caucus members who spent this legislative session fighting carbon capture as some sort of Johnny-Come-Latelies when he himself fits in that category.

Other than voting against some Green New Deal garbage tangentially related to carbon capture in a military appropriations bill back in 2016, John Fleming doesn’t have anything in his political record where he’s in opposition to carbon capture.

Does that mean I think he’s for carbon capture? No. I don’t doubt he’s against it or that he’d be a good vote in the Senate on that issue. That’s not the issue.

The issue is that if you’re going to beat Bill Cassidy, you don’t need to be attacking the Chuck Owens and Brett Geymanns of the world who are your natural allies in the Legislature and have actual constituencies – voters – they can deliver support from to somebody who’s worthy of it.

And yet he did it.

If you click on the link to my response, Fleming got ratioed pretty badly – and not by a bunch of nobodies. Connie Hair, who’s the Louisiana rep for the State Freedom Caucus Network, a bunch of legislators and some conservative activists of note, are all hammering him for shooting inside the tent.

And then came something even dumber. Fleming is in that thread arguing with them, which means he’s drawing attention to a thread which talks about how dumb his “one true conservative” gambit on this issue is.

I bring all this up not to trash him. What I’m trying to get across is that I can’t invest in him as the guy we get behind to knock out Cassidy when the messaging and strategy is this bad. That isn’t to say we’re endorsing Miguez. But it is to say that if Fleming is going to make mistakes like this as a matter of course we won’t have much of a choice.