Fooled by Democrats, hated by Republicans, mourned by almost nobody.

I’ve done a few national radio and podcast interviews since Saturday night, when Bill Cassidy’s career in electoral politics came to an abrupt end. A lot of the national folks are absolutely shocked at Cassidy’s dismal performance. I’m having to tell them that nobody in Louisiana — other than perhaps Cassidy and his wife — is at all surprised. Cassidy didn’t just lose Saturday night. He got clobbered. He finished third with only 25 percent of the vote behind Congresswoman Julia Letlow (45 percent) and State Treasurer John Fleming (28 percent).

Three-quarters of Louisiana’s Republican voters gave him the finger. And it was well deserved. Cassidy came to represent virtually everything people hate about the legacy Republican Party, the animal which existed prior to Donald Trump’s arrival, elephant gun in hand, and descent down that escalator in Manhattan. Cassidy, by trade a gastroenterologist whose clientele was almost solely made up of Medicaid patients, got into politics as a state legislator and made his way to Congress and then on to the Senate, beating the fossilized Mary Landrieu in a not-close election in 2014. Cassidy said at that time he was only interested in two terms in the Senate, but he reneged on that pledge.

That was only one of the betrayals that Louisiana’s conservatives, and those around the country, perceived from Cassidy. Everyone remembers the thing that was the death knell of Cassidy’s political career, and they ought to. He was one of the meatheaded moron Republican Senators — there were seven of them — who voted in favor of a post-presidential impeachment of Donald Trump, supposedly owing to Trump’s role in turning the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protest into a riot.

It took more than five years before Louisiana’s GOP voters had an opportunity to punish Cassidy for that vote, but it turns out that on Saturday, the memory was as fresh and turgid as if it had just happen…

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