The 2014 United States Senate election in Louisiana was held on November 4, 2014, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the State of Louisiana.
Incumbent senator Mary Landrieu ran for re-election to a fourth term in office against U.S. Representative Bill Cassidy and several other candidates. This was one of the seven Democratic-held Senate seats up for election in a state that Mitt Romney won in the 2012 presidential election.
Under Louisiana's jungle primary system, all candidates appear on the same ballot, regardless of party and voters may vote for any candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. Louisiana is the only state that has a jungle primary system (California and Washington have a similar "top two primary" system). Since no candidate received a majority of the vote in the primary election, a runoff election was held on December 6, 2014, between the top two candidates, Landrieu and Cassidy.
In the December 6 runoff, Cassidy defeated Landrieu by 11.86 percentage points (55.93% to 44.07%), settling the fate of the final Senate seat of the 2014 midterms, becoming the first Republican to hold this seat since 1883, and giving Senate Republicans 54 seats in the 114th Congress. Since Cassidy took office in 2015, Republicans have held both of Louisiana's Senate seats, which they had not done since William Pitt Kellogg resigned in 1872. Cassidy's victory in the 2014 runoff also rendered Cedric Richmond as Louisiana's only congressional Democrat.
Elections in Louisiana, with the exception of U.S. presidential elections, follow a variation of the open primary system called the jungle primary. Candidates of any and all parties are listed on one ballot; voters need not limit themselves to the candidates of one party. Unless one candidate takes more than 50% of the vote in the first round, a run-off election is then held between the top two candidates, who may in fact be members of the same party. This scenario occurred in the 7th District congressional race in 1996, when Democrats Chris John and Hunter Lundy made the runoff for the open seat, and in 1999, when Republicans Suzanne Haik Terrell and Woody Jenkins made the runoff for Commissioner of Elections.
Jungle primary<br />
Republican primary<br />
Cassidy won five of the six congressional districts in Louisiana.