In early June, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal stood in front of a Baptist church in the city of Monroe and signed a bill that could shutter most of the state’s abortion clinics, in an echo of provisions passed in Texas, Mississippi and Alabama in recent years.
Anthony List plans to spend more than $1 million against Landrieu on a ground campaign and its own ads, which describe Landrieu’s vote for the Affordable Care Act as a vote for “taxpayer-funded abortion.”Īccess to abortion has become increasingly restricted in Louisiana, as it has in other midterm battlegrounds like North Carolina. On Sunday, members of his staff attended an annual breakfast in Baton Rouge sponsored by Right to Life, the group responsible for the anti-Landrieu billboard in Lafayette as well as several others in Shreveport and on the interstate that runs through Southern Louisiana. Cassidy is deeply conservative when it comes to abortion he opposes it even in cases of rape and incest. In this heavily Catholic state, women’s health could prove a more meaningful point of divergence between the candidates. Just last week the state’s Republican senator David Vitter passed on an opportunity to hit for Cassidy-whom he supports-when he said he might be open to expanding Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act. The politics around Obamacare are shifting in Landrieu’s favor, too.
There’s little daylight between Landrieu and Cassidy in their stance on energy and business-so little that many of the industry groups known for supporting establishment Republicans are betting on Landrieu and the weight she pulls as chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Conventional wisdom says that Obamacare and energy are the key issues for voters in Louisiana, where Barack Obama is deeply unpopular and petrochemical interests have a stranglehold on state politics. Her main competition is Bill Cassidy, a Republican congressman and doctor. Louisiana has no primaries, so Landrieu is in a four-way scrum to avoid a runoff.
Landrieu’s campaign is one of the closest and most closely watched contests of the midterm elections, as it could decide which party controls the Senate.