The U.S. Senate Republican primary debate was informative, combative if cordial, and displayed how the candidates tried to play to their strengths.
The debate, sponsored by the Moon Griffon Show, featured only Treas. John Fleming and Rep. Julia Letlow. Incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, despite numerous invitations, didn’t attend.
The math, as most recently evidenced by the latest independent poll, has these two running neck-and-neck with Cassidy several points back. Polling suggests that if Cassidy were to make the inevitable runoff he would lose decisively to either, so it was in the interests of both candidates to attack each other in the hopes Cassidy could crest over the opponent.
So, it was contentious as a feature, focusing on several issues. Clearly throughout both candidates had been well-briefed, although overall Fleming appeared to be a bit sharper in his rejoinders. This shouldn’t be a surprise since Fleming has run for office seven times over the years, with three previous being competitive, two statewide. By contrast, Letlow’s three attempts have featured noncompetitive contests in a smaller footprint, and experience in these matters helps.
On some, the candidates basically fought to a draw. Letlow threw around the name “Trump” liberally, emphasizing the president’s endorsement of her rather than Fleming, who worked in the GOP Pres. Donald Trump’s administration in the first term. Fleming reiterated he likely didn’t get the Trump nod because, he claimed, Letlow ally Republican Gov. Jeff Landry ran interference and Trump had nothing but good things to say about his candidacy. If the debate’s consumers accepted this, that countered Letlow’s argument about how she had a great relationship with Trump and would continue that in the Senate.
Letlow’s other highest point came over a discussion about congressional term limits, but not for support of that in which she joined Fleming in the affirmative. In doing so, she cagily framed herself in her forties as the young, energetic alternative, implying that Fleming in his mid-seventies wouldn’t be around long to build up expertise and seniority. Also, she accused Fleming, who has been elected to three different offices and run for a fourth over 30 years, of being a career politician and job-hopper, although she herself wants to hop from the House to Senate and later implied she wanted to spend a long time in the Senate.
However, on others, Fleming had the upper hand, some in a returning a serve. On a question about lobbying, Letlow delivered a clever but semantically-driven attack on Fleming’s former work as a lobbyist, alleging he continued to work as one and that it would be bad to send a lobbyist to Washington, Ironically, Fleming’s predecessor in Congress Republican Rep. Jim McCrery was a lobbyist before being elected eight times.
Her line could have worked because at present Fleming receives remuneration as an advisor to a concern, as he himself noted, but that doesn’t mandate him to register as a lobbyist. So, he’s not one but those technicalities are difficult to convey to the audience even as he did well enough to try to counter it. But in angling that way, she opened herself up to counterattack in having Fleming note that her fiancĂ© worked extensively in lobbying for carbon capture and sequestration, an industry about which he has been severely critical and an activity Letlow knows conservative voters tend to oppose. She retreated into declaring this as an impermissible dragging of family into the debate, but it came off more as trying to define a topic illegitimate in order to evade consequences of her association to an unpopular view of it – that is, the implication that if her future husband did that, she would have every incentive to favor CCS.
She also lost ground on the larger CCS issue. For her, the best defense was a good offense by trying to link past Fleming congressional votes, on extremely roundabout and tangential legislation to the issue, to support of CCS. Regardless, as Fleming has spent so much time on the issue – roundly condemning the federal tax credit that if it didn’t exist CCS would collapse as an economic concern and promising to file legislation to end it – he had effective rebuttals to all her attempts, including drawing a distinction between storage for enhanced oil recovery that he supported and sequestration, which he never has.
Letlow also had trouble with the diversity, equity and inclusion issue, stemming from her comments in applying for a college presidency, as well as others in writing before and after, in support of the issue almost universally opposed by Republicans. While she did point to many votes in Congress against the imposition of this (although Fleming brought up a 2023 vote that appeared to contradict that), the elephant in the room for her is that DEI was well-known in academia at the time and her protestations that she didn’t really understand its implications or how it would evolve as an issue seem implausible. Yet if true, it would beg the question of how oblivious she could be, which would not commend one to serving in an elective office.
The ”obliviousness” angle also popped up in a question about an investigation into potential unethical equities trading practices. Her defense was she didn’t know it had happened and corrected as soon as she found out, but Fleming noted House rules made the member ultimately responsible regardless of intent or knowledge.
Throughout, Fleming tended to take a more issue-oriented tone while Letlow settled on a more personality-centric approach. The first question exemplified this, concerning votes about past and present farm bills. Letlow’s complaint that Fleming had voted against a couple of such bills she presented as uncompassionate towards the agriculture industry in the state, while he defended these saying that those allowed too much spending on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (although likely few voters in the primary actually are affected directly by that legislation). She more often tried to bring responses back to herself as a person while Fleming, with a few exceptions, framed almost everything in terms of issues.
Keep in mind the debate audience not only would be disproportionately Republican, but disproportionately activist and conservative. With that in mind, Fleming came out on top, but as the audience will make up a small portion of the electorate (although their opinions will be solicited by others), that doesn’t settle the race by any means.
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