Hayride Piece: Polls Edge Closer to Predicting Fleming-Letlow for LA GOP Senate runoff

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It’s true, a month out from party primary elections, it’s uncertain which of three serious Republican candidates will advance to an inevitable runoff. And there’s a polling-based reason for that, which a little historical data and common sense can partially address to give a better idea who’s likely to be part of that duo.

In the last several days, the campaign for Treas. John Fleming released one, and two others have come from other organizations, although there are no details as to who paid for these. Rep. Julia Letlow was named the leader in those, while the Fleming campaign had him on top with incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy running second. The other polls had him running third.

This continues a pattern where campaigns release polls favorable to their candidate, which may be why Cassidy’s camp hasn’t released any recently. None of the most recent trio had him at better than 26 percent, which is abysmal for a sitting senator who by himself already has spent probably at least $10 million on his reelection (as of the end of the year; the most recent numbers through the first quarter of 2026 will be available later this week) and has had surrogate political action committees as well churning out cash on his behalf.

The immediate question, obviously, is why the results vary so widely, with these latest indicating Cassidy from 19-26 percent, Fleming from 23-34 percent, and Letlow from 19-31 percent. As previously noted, many factors such as question wording and ordering could play a role. However, the most prominent of these is sample composition, specifically the mix of Republicans and unaffiliated voters that will show up.

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Both Cassidy and Letlow and their surrogates have run very broadcast-heavy, indiscriminate campaigns. Moreover, these have trended increasingly negative in sum. The problem with this is unaffiliated voters — the vast majority of whom are so because either they are minimally interested in politics or they are but also disappointed in the major parties in, often perceiving their identifiers as too prone to conflict — see these ads as either validating their disinterest because the ads largely don’t give reasons to vote for a candidate or exemplifying the very conflict that has them casting a pox on major parties.

By contrast, Fleming’s media is very focused on ideological audiences, and he engages in a good deal of retail campaigning to more ideological gatherings. Keep in mind that, even as the extraordinary amount of advertising almost certainly will boost overall turnout well beyond the 12.93 percent Republican turnout in 2010 – perhaps even more than double – that subset of voters will be demonstrably unrepresentative of Republicans as a whole in that they will comprise disproportionately of ideological voters, which is precisely the demographic he tries so hard to cultivate through a strategy of mainly targeted radio and other electronic communications and retail politics. These people also are more likely to communicate to others or be solicited to communicate their opinions about the election than the voter mix the other candidates prefer.

That polling results within days of each other wildly vary most likely signals different sampling mixes (which also may interact with how partisanship is identified: by registration or by self-identification) based upon imagined campaign scenarios. Yet from the best data available, at this time the most likely electorate mix probably will produce what happens when taking the ranges in the three latest polls – Fleming leads Letlow into the runoff, and the sitting senator Cassidy starts making his post-Senate plans.

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