WASHINGTON – Republicans won their 54th U.S. Senate seat going away when Rep. Bill Cassidy easily defeated incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu in a runoff election in Louisiana Saturday.
Cassidy was leading by 30 points in early returns when the Associated Press called the race.
The result gives the GOP its ninth Senate-seat pickup in this year’s elections. Republicans will have 54 Senate seats next year, and Democrats will control 46.
Though Landrieu tried to distance herself from Barack Obama’s presidency throughout the general election and the runoff, it proved to be an impossibility.
Landrieu, the only Democratic senator from the Deep South and the only remaining Democrat elected statewide in Louisiana, worked during her campaign to declare her independence, noting that she had opposed the administration’s moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 BP oil spill, and supported construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Cassidy, meanwhile, repeatedly told voters Landrieu has voted in line with Obama’s positions 97 percent of the time, and reminded them that she voted in 2010 for Obamacare, which is unpopular in Louisiana and throughout the country. Cassidy pledged to repeal it throughout his campaign.
Cassidy, 57, is a medical doctor and associate professor of medicine at Louisiana State University who entered the House of Representatives in 2009. With his election, the Republican Party picked up nine Senate seats in the midterm elections.
According to his congressional website, he treated uninsured patients at the public Earl K. Long Hospital in Baton Rouge for two decades, founded a community health-care clinic and in 2005 set up an emergency medical facility for Katrina evacuees in an abandoned Kmart.
Cassidy co-founded the Greater Baton Rouge Community Clinic, a clinic providing free dental and health care to the working uninsured. He also created a private-public partnership to vaccinate 36,000 greater Baton Rouge area children against Hepatitis B at no cost to the schools or parents.
He is married to Laura Cassidy, who is a retired general surgeon specializing in breast cancer. They attend church at the Chapel on the Campus and have three children.
In the U.S. House, Cassidy serves on the Energy & Commerce Committee and its subcommittees on Health; Energy and Power; and Environment and the Economy. He serves as an assistant whip for the House Republican Conference. His legislative focus is health care and energy.
Landrieu had served three terms as a U.S. senator.
