Risky for LA GOP to endorse for 2026 Senate

Louisiana state Republicans need to acclimate themselves to the new reality of partially closed primaries by making endorsements prior to the primary election rare.

Party leaders have begun an internal debate over whether to follow the strategy of endorsement before the initial election of the 2023 governor’s race as applied 2026 U.S. Senate campaign. It has at this time only two declared candidates, Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy and GOP state Treas. John Fleming, but Fleming has asked the state party – whether through the state central committee that meets quarterly or by an interim decision by its much smaller executive committee – to endorse him along the lines of what the executive committee did almost a year prior to the 2023 race by tabbing Republican Gov. Jeff Landry.

The rest is history – other GOP candidates entered, but Landry waxed the field, raising record amounts of cash. This certainly avoided the disastrous repeat of 2015 when two other quality Republicans joined in against the favorite Republican former Sen. David Vitter; while they didn’t prevent him from making the blanket primary runoff, they did fray him around the edges and one, Jay Dardenne, threw his support to eventual winner Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards and was rewarded with the second-ranked job in the executive branch. Neither did the party endorse businessman Eddie Rispone nor former Rep. Ralph Abraham in 2019 and another intermural tussle ensued, with Rispone going through to lose narrowly to Edwards.

So, the temptation to back a horse months or even a year-plus to the election may be there from this history, but if history is to guide it needs to be complete. Going back to 1990, the first time the state party had a desire to endorse in an open seat or against an incumbent because up until then so few quality Republicans ran for statewide offices that there was no need to choose, most of the time these ended in failure, if not badly.

In 1990, the party endorsed former state Sen. Ben Bagert to try to stave off the fraudulent state Rep. David Duke that ended disastrously when Bagert quit the Senate race in the face of Duke momentum. It tried again in 1991 for the governorship by eschewing recent convert former Gov. Buddy Roemer for former Rep. Clyde Holloway, again ending disastrously as both times Democrats won.

Perhaps the party could be forgiven for such defensive moves in the face of an unscrupulous candidate who tried to hide a number of issue preferences at odds with the party, but the next few attempts also backfired. In 1995, it endorsed former state Rep, Quentin Dastugue but he didn’t even make it to qualifying while party-switcher GOP former Gov. Mike Foster ended up winning. In 2003, a cabal of party insiders informally crowned former state House Speaker Hunt Downer for governor, only to have former Gov. Bobby Jindal lead the field into the runoff and lose narrowly. Getting back into a Senate race, for 2008 the party leadership backed Sen. John Kennedy (in a partially closed primary) after he had switched parties from his 2004 run that Vitter won outright, but he lost to Democrat former Sen. Mary Landrieu.

As it was, Landrieu was involved in the only prior successful endorsement by the party when it threw its support behind Cassidy’s initial run in 2014. That and the fact the next attempt with Landry worked out might tempt leaders to do it again.

However, that runs counter to what typically state parties do. As until the last decade almost every statewide election in America was conducted under closed and open primary systems (since then two other states have adopted blanket primaries while Alaska has introduced ranked choice voting into its), an extensive record exists that shows seldom does a state party endorse in its own statewide primaries.

This happens in large part because most states don’t even allow this. And in the few that do, it’s often not good politics to pre-pick somebody because if somebody else wins that can create unneeded animosity between candidate and state party, if not lose the race against the other party’s candidate because of that.

The latter is extremely unlikely for Republicans with the 2026 Senate contest in Louisiana, but consider as well the nature of the endorsement option under the blanket primary system. There, because anybody could run with your label and against those of the other major party, that would attract using a party’s label candidates significantly ideologically out-of-tune with the party and/or faking ideological adherence. In a closed primary, those traits become heavily penalized but not in a blanket primary, where non-affiliates of the party could sabotage adherent candidates of the party by supporting non-adherent candidates of it along with other less-informed voters of the party to ace out adherent candidates. Thus, in a blanket primary system the party’s imprimatur is a useful signal for voters that loses much of its utility in a closed primary where (at least in Louisiana’s partially closed system) the other major party voters cannot interfere and back a non-adherent.

Thus, with the value of a pre-primary endorsement much reduced in a partially closed primary and the costs of acrimony potentially from making a choice higher, such an endorsement should occur only when there is a clearly unacceptable candidate. Cassidy’s wrong bet on Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s future and his unnecessary dalliances with Democrats may not even rise to the level of unacceptability that would trigger the state GOP endorsing one or more other Republicans, and it would seem too risky just to pick one. Therefore, state Republicans need to think long and hard about endorsing anybody for the 2026 Senate contest, as the downside seems greater than the upside under the revived system of partially closed primaries.