The Republican Trying To Out-maga Trump's Pick To A Senate Victory

John Fleming is trying to prove he’s MAGA enough to win a Senate seat over a Trump-endorsed opponent.

Fleming, Louisiana’s state treasurer and a former Trump administration official and congressman, is locked in a vicious runoff with Rep. Julia Letlow, who boasts powerful twin endorsements from the president and Gov. Jeff Landry. She’s widely considered the frontrunner, but Fleming has been gaining momentum in the final weeks ahead of Saturday’s contest. After a strong second-place finish for Fleming in the first round of voting helped end Trump-skeptical Sen. Bill Cassidy’s career, recent public polling shows he’s got a shot at winning the whole thing.

“Anybody who looked at us on paper would say, well, I'm the obvious MAGA Republican Trump choice,” Fleming said in an interview. He’s betting that Republicans, relieved to have ousted Cassidy over his sins against MAGA, will now be asking a different question in this round: who is the most conservative candidate?

“They've spent the last month looking at us and comparing us, and what they find is, if you want a Trump-like candidate, if you want somebody who's very conservative, somebody who is much more consistent with MAGA policies, then Fleming is the person,” he said, referring to himself .

Fleming has closely yoked himself to the president and his agenda in spite of Trump’s endorsement for Letlow. A campaign slogan states Fleming was “MAGA before MAGA was cool,” and the campaign put up billboards of him pictured standing beside Trump throughout high-traffic areas like I-89 in Baton Rouge before Letlow got into the race.

Katherine Thordahl, a Letlow campaign spokesperson, said Letlow carried 52 of 64 parishes in the first round of primary voting, and “early vote numbers reinforce what we've been seeing on the ground: our voters are engaged.”

“Our path to victory is simple, continue turning out the Republicans who know Julia's record of delivering results, trust her to work alongside President Trump, and want a new generation of conservative leadership in the U.S. Senate,” she said in a statement.

Letlow has built a reputation as a disciplined messenger and reliable Trump vote during her swift rise in Louisiana politics. She has earned backing from influential Louisiana Republicans and assembled a respectable war chest. But Fleming has a strong grassroots following and conservative street cred from his time in the House Freedom Caucus, along with statewide name ID and personal wealth that has let him self-fund his campaign. Trump even recently commended him, calling him one of “two great people” facing off against Cassidy during the first round.

Trump appeared on a tele-town hall on behalf of Letlow on Thursday evening, his signature move for primary candidates he supports this cycle, and urged attendees to “get out and vote for Julia Letlow. She’s fantastic. She’s going to do a great job.” Trump did not mention Fleming in his brief remarks.

Should Fleming win, it would represent the latest evidence that the MAGA faithful are willing to buck the president’s advice for one of their own – and suggests a slight diminishing of Trump’s endorsement power after a trio of missteps in recent weeks. Big-spending self-funder Rick Jackson’s win in Georgia and Zach Lahn’s victory in Iowa over a pair of Trump-backed candidates in recent weeks, followed by South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson’s Tuesday primary win for governor after Trump initially backed his rival before rushing to dual-endorse in the race’s closing days, are signs the endorsement isn’t foolproof. A Letlow loss would also show the limits of the political influence of Landry, who has gone all in to boost her and badgered donors to open their wallets on her behalf.

Fleming’s supporters say they still respect the president but they’re siding with him over Letlow because of his conservative credentials and focus on halting the spread of carbon capture infrastructure. That issue has animated local Republicans over their concerns that the emerging technology poses risks to their health and the environment, along with fears about eminent domain seizures.

“The Washington politicians and the country club elite think that it's all about money, and it's not,” said Woody Jenkins, chairman of the East Baton Rouge GOP parish and a Fleming supporter. “The people are still in charge.”

Fleming, 74, has been laying the groundwork for a grassroots upset since he launched his campaign last December. A physician who owns dozens of Subway restaurants throughout north Louisiana, he has used his wealth to almost entirely self-fund his campaign, to the tune of $11 million. He brags about distributing more than 20,000 yard signs and inspiring a force of hundreds of volunteers.

This marks his second attempt at landing a U.S. Senate seat: in 2016 he came in fifth in an all-party primary to eventual winner Sen. John Kennedy. After that loss, he served in several roles in the Trump administration, with a final stop as White House deputy chief of staff. He then returned to Louisiana, and won the state treasurer runoff in 2023.

Fleming’s proximity to Trump has some Louisiana Republicans wondering why he wasn’t the one to earn his golden-ticket endorsement. Fleming says he never had the opportunity to solicit Trump’s endorsement, claiming that Landry obstructed his access to the White House. When Fleming eventually personally reached the president in February, he said Trump told him “‘You’re fantastic, why didn’t you call me?’”

“And I said, ‘Sir, everyone around you blocked me. They would not allow me to speak with you.’”

A spokesperson for Landry did not respond to a request for comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment when asked to confirm the exchange between Fleming and Trump.

Fleming declined to comment when asked about recent communications he’s had with the White House about a potential double endorsement, like the president issued in the South Carolina gubernatorial runoff.

Landry and Fleming have clashed throughout the election over Landry’s endorsement of Letlow, and Landry has accused Fleming of flip-flopping on his position on carbon capture. They most recently got into it over an AI-produced video promoted by Fleming that shows a fake version of Letlow mentioning her deceased husband, whose death from Covid shortly after his 2020 election led to her running for the seat he had won, along with her current fiance’s job as a lobbyist. Letlow fired back with her own video calling the spot “unconscionable” and accusing

him of making “a spectacle” of her husband’s death.

A knock cited by Fleming opponents is his age. He would be in his early 80s at the end of a first term, while Letlow would be in her early 50s. A pro-Letlow group warned in a recent ad that Fleming would be the oldest first-term senator, a generational age argument typically seen in Democratic primaries, like in the case of Maine Gov. Janet Mills, 78, who was crushed in her Senate primary by Graham Platner, 41, after suspending her campaign.

“There are a lot of people looking to have a younger group leading our country, I think that's part of the appeal for Julia as well,” said GOP state Sen. Thomas Pressly, a Letlow supporter.

Letlow led the first round of the May primary by 44 percent to Fleming’s 28 percent, coming close to winning it outright, but recent polling has found a much closer race; a recent Fleming internal poll showed him leading by five points, while a poll conducted by New Orleans pollster Greg Rigamer, paid for by a Letlow supporter, had her ahead by two points.

Turnout in Saturday’s election is forecast to be strikingly low, making it hard to predict the electorate. Low-turnout GOP runoff races tend to benefit the most-conservative candidates with the most devoted followings, like with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s recent victory over Sen. John Cornyn. That could help Fleming in Louisiana because his supporters are “much more motivated,” said Louisiana GOP Rep. Mike Bayham, who is publicly neutral in the race.

In the end, Fleming is counting on independently-minded Trump supporters to show up in droves. “There’s a large body of Republicans in Louisiana that just go ‘look, we love President Trump, we agree with him, but we know that he endorses a lot of people… and so we're going to go with the candidate that we choose, not just because someone's endorsed by the president.’”