Letlow holds off Davis to keep Louisiana US Senate seat in GOP hands

Republican Congresswoman Julia Letlow survived a closer-than-expected challenge from Democrat Jamie Davis to claim Louisiana’s open seat in the U.S. Senate.

The Associated Press did not call the race for Letlow until 99% of votes had been counted. She prevailed with 50.9% support to Davis 49.1%, despite strong turnout among Black voters and Democrats in the early voting period.

Letlow’s win Tuesday caps a string of victories this year that included displacing incumbent U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy in the May GOP primary and besting state Treasurer John Fleming in the June runoff for the party nomination.

The win makes Letlow the first Republican woman in Louisiana to win a U.S. Senate race and the state’s second woman ever elected to the office. She’s also the first U.S. senator elected from Northeast Louisiana since Democrat Joseph Ransdell held the post from 1913-31, when he lost to Gov. Huey Long.  

Letlow’s victory was among the few bright spots for the GOP, which lost its majority in both chambers of Congress.

“There is so much excitement in Louisiana,” Letlow told supporters at her election night party at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. “Don’t believe the negativity. There is so much opportunity.”

The political ascension of Letlow has unfolded at a breakneck pace, who just six years ago was an administrator at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Her husband, Luke Letlow, won the 2020 election for the 5th Congressional District to succeed U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham, for whom he served as chief of staff. 

But just five days before he was to be sworn into office, Luke Letlow died from complications related to COVID-19. Three months later, Julia Letlow won a special election to fill the vacancy and was re-elected twice. Through redistricting in 2024, the 5th District was shifted to pull more Baton Rouge voters into its boundaries, and Julia Letlow relocated to the capital the following year with her two young children. 

Letlow’s name by then had emerged among prominent Republicans who could unseat Cassidy, who was marked for ouster by President Donald Trump after he voted to convict him in his impeachment trial for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump used his social media platform to strongly suggest Letlow enter the Senate race just days before she announced her candidacy, and he officially endorsed her four days later.  

The president’s backing of Letlow did little to dissuade Cassidy and Fleming from touting their connections to the president during the GOP primary campaign. All three candidates featured Trump prominently in their television commercials and billboards. 

But since her party-runoff win, Letlow has made few public appearances in the run-up to Nov. 3. Trump had no involvement in the Louisiana race until he staged a “tele-rally” for Letlow on the eve of the election, pulled together just days before when it became evident Davis was making the race more competitive than anticipated.

Davis, a third-generation farmer from Tensas Parish, vaulted to the Democratic nomination with only minimal political experience. He was a member of Tensas Parish Police Jury from 2016-19, sits on the Democratic State Central Committee and lost a state legislative race in 2023.

The strong showing for Davis resulted from momentum among Black voters that started to build soon after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in April in a Louisiana redistricting case. Conservative justices ruled that the Republican-led state Legislature could redraw the state’s U.S. House districts to remove one of Louisiana’s two majority-Black congressional districts in a case that significantly reduced protections for racial minority voters nationwide

At his election night party in Baton Rouge, Davis signaled to the state’s Republican leader that Democrats intend on putting up a serious challenge to his re-election bid next year.

“Jeff Landry, you’re on notice, buddy,” Davis said.

James Carville, the Democratic campaign adviser who propelled Bill Clinton to the presidency, made a prescient statement during an interview with the Illuminator last week when asked about the total lack of national Democratic Party resources put into the U.S. Senate race in Louisiana.

“If Jamie loses by two points, we are going to get up Wednesday morning, and we are going to wonder where the hell were you?” Carville said.

In-person and absentee voting totals from the early voting showed 34% participation from Black voters, a new high for a congressional midterm election in Louisiana, and 17,000 more Democrats than Republicans casting ballots statewide.

Davis also repeatedly pushed a hot-button bipartisan issue during his campaign: the growing trend among elected officials in Louisiana to sign non-disclosure agreements related to economic development. He reminded voters Letlow had signed an NDA involving the massive Meta Hyperion data center campus being built in Richland Parish, and that she purchased stock in companies involved in the project without disclosing those transactions as required by federal law. 

Letlow has played down those investments, claiming she was unaware her financial advisers were buying the stocks in question. 

A poll the Davis campaign paid for showed him in a dead heat with Letlow as of Friday, and national election trackers began to signal the Republican Party could be vulnerable in Louisiana. Davis also erased nearly all of Letlow’s fundraising edge, drawing within $2 million of the $7 million her campaign had amassed as of mid-October.

Davis received  720,106 votes, the most ever for a Black candidate in a statewide election in Louisiana, surpassing Cleo Fields (565,861) in the 1995 runoff for governor that he lost to Mike Foster.

Letlow finished just 25,857 votes ahead of Davis with more than 1.46 million total votes cast. Turnout statewide for the Senate election was 49.3% unofficially, according to the Secretary of State.

Julie O’Donoghue and Piper Hutchinson contributed to this report.