The Republican senator Bill Cassidy lost his primary on Saturday, as voters in Louisiana opted instead to advance two challengers to a runoff election after an extraordinary intervention by Donald Trump to oust the incumbent.
Cassidy’s bid to win the Republican party’s nomination for a third term in the deep-red state was imperiled by his decision to vote in favor of Trump’s conviction after the January 6 insurrection. In what was widely seen as an effort to rehabilitate his standing with the president, Cassidy last year cast the deciding vote to advance the vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, flying in the face of the senator’s support for immunizations and training as a physician.
