Cassidy loss leaves just two Trump impeachment GOP holdouts in Congress

Bill Cassidy’s defeat in Louisiana closed another chapter on the small band of Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 attack. With Cassidy’s loss in the Louisiana Republican primary on May 16, 2026, no more than two of the seven GOP senators who backed conviction are now likely to remain in Congress next year.

Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, had staked his standing on the Senate’s second impeachment trial of Trump, where the chamber voted 57-43 on February 13, 2021, to acquit the former president. The conviction effort fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds threshold required in the Senate. Seven Republicans joined Democrats in support of conviction, the largest bipartisan vote in a presidential impeachment conviction attempt in U.S. history.

The seven senators were Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Pat Toomey. Most are already gone. Burr, Sasse and Toomey have left the Senate, Romney is out, and Cassidy’s primary defeat now clears the way for his departure as well. That leaves only Collins of Maine and Murkowski of Alaska as possible holdovers in Congress next year, depending on future elections.

Cassidy’s fall is also a measure of how fully the Republican Party has enforced loyalty to Trump since the Capitol riot and the impeachment trial that followed. He was targeted by Trump and backed by a Trump-endorsed challenger, a reminder that the former president’s influence in GOP primaries has outlasted his time in office. For Republicans, the lesson has been stark: a vote against Trump can still carry a steep political price.

Cassidy had also tried to show he could remain a viable Republican while breaking with the party line on select issues, including backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a health post. But in a party still defined by Trump allegiance, those choices did not outweigh the vote that mattered most. The list of senators who once broke with Trump is now shrinking to the edge of extinction.