Baton Rouge6 of 7 Trump conviction voters ousted.
Cassidy came third in Saturday’s Louisiana primary with 24.6%, behind Trump-backed Letlow — the last of seven post-January 6 conviction senators forced from office.
Letlow and Fleming meet in a June 27 runoff; the US Senate seat has no serious general-election challenger.
Sources: The Guardian
THE SEVEN
Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump in the February 2021 impeachment trial — the most bipartisan conviction vote in US history, though still 10 short of the two-thirds needed. With Cassidy's loss, six of the seven are now out of the Senate. Only Murkowski survives, protected by Alaska's ranked-choice ballot.
WHY THE SUPERMAJORITY
The Constitution sets conviction at two-thirds of senators present — a deliberately high bar drawn from English impeachment practice. Hamilton argued in Federalist 65 that a simple majority would make impeachment a routine partisan weapon. No US president has ever been removed by Senate conviction.
THE PRIMARY WEAPON
In closed primaries, the median voter is far more partisan than the median general-election voter. A senator who votes against the party's base on a defining issue can win 55% statewide and still lose a primary 35-65. The mechanism is structural, not personal — and it's why intra-party discipline has tightened across both parties since the 2010s.
LOUISIANA'S JUNGLE
Louisiana uses a 'jungle primary' — all candidates from every party run together; if no one clears 50%, the top two advance to a runoff regardless of party. It was designed by Edwin Edwards in 1975 to weaken party machines. In practice it lets the dominant party stage its internal fight as the real election.
THE HISTORICAL ECHO
Party purges of dissenters are not new. After the 1938 midterms, FDR tried to defeat conservative Democrats who blocked his court-packing plan — and mostly failed. What's changed is the primary calendar: incumbents now face mandatory intra-party tests every cycle, where FDR had to engineer challenges from scratch.