Cassidy wins Louisiana’s U.S. Senate run-off
Democrats lose another seat
NEW ORLEANS – Republicans capped a banner election year Saturday by ousting Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, completing a rout of once-invincible Democrats from the Deep South.
The victory by three-term Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy of Baton Rouge was virtually preordained when the Democrats’ national campaign arm abandoned the race after Landrieu failed to win re-election outright Nov. 4, forcing Saturday’s runoff. With nearly all the votes counted, unofficial returns showed Cassidy with a commanding victory.
The seat was the ninth picked up this year by Republicans, who also knocked off incumbents in Arkansas and North Carolina, pushing the GOP majority to 54 of 100 seats starting with the new Congress in January.
The defeat of Landrieu, who was bidding for a fourth term, was a serious blow to one of the dynastic families of Louisiana politics; Landrieu’s brother, Mitch, is a former lieutenant governor and currently New Orleans mayor, a position held by their father, “Moon,” in the 1970s.
More broadly, the contest carried heavy symbolic weight.
Sen. Landrieu is one of a dying breed, a white Southern Democrat holding federal office, and she was fighting not just Cassidy, a lackluster opponent who largely ducked public appearances, but decades-long forces that have transformed the region from a Democratic stronghold to arguably the most zealously Republican redoubt in the nation.
The results have been stark. Landrieu’s defeat means starting in January, Democrats will not control a single governorship, U.S. Senate seat, or legislative chamber from the Carolinas to Texas. It also leaves Democrats with just three U.S senators among 22 representing the states of the old Confederacy: two from Virginia and one from Florida, the least-typical of Southern states.
“The Deep South has become a no-fly zone for Democrats,” said Charlie Cook, a Louisiana native and publisher of the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan handicappers guide to congressional elections. “Outside of urban areas and a minority (House) districts, Democrats can’t win.”
Landrieu was not the only legacy candidate thwarted Saturday.
Former Gov. Edwin Edwards failed in his bid to capture Cassidy’s vacated central Louisiana seat, an improbable comeback attempt at age 87.
The former four-term Democratic governor served more than eight years in federal prison for fraud, racketeering and extortion in connection with the licensing of riverboat casinos.
He left prison in 2011.
Edwards lost in the heavily Republican district to Garret Graves, a former adviser to Gov. Bobby Jindal.