Mediaboss Marketing

Victorious Republican Bill Cassidy: He focused his campaign on attacking Barack Obama.

Baton Rouge:Mary Landrieu, the last deep south Democrat in the US Senate, was handed a crushing defeat in a mid-term run-off election here on Saturday by Republican congressman Bill Cassidy,completing a generation-long shift towards the Republican Party taking political control of America's deep south.

MrsLandrieu's 12-point loss in Louisiana means the Democrats will now be left without a single US senator or governor across nine states stretching from the Carolinas to Texas, confirming a shift that began in the late 1960s.

The loss by Mrs Landrieu, the incumbent Democrat and scion of a local political dynasty, means that Republicans will hold 54 seats in the 100-member US Senate when it is sworn in in January.

Bill Cassidy, the 57-year-old Louisiana congressman who defeated Mrs Landrieu, described the victories as the "exclamation point" on a 2014 midterm election campaign that racked up huge Republican gains and left President Barack Obama increasingly isolated in the White House.

Advertisement

Dr Cassidy focused his campaign on attacking Mr Obama, whose personal approval rating has slumped to 45 per cent. Dr Cassidy's win marks a high point of Republican control in the South, which was once a stronghold of Democrats who had supported slavery and segregation, but whose standing was undermined with white voters by John F. Kennedy's Civil Rights Act of 1964.

With Dr Cassidy's victory in what had been the last undecided Senate race of the midterm elections, the Republicans gained a total of nine Senate seats, giving them 54 senators and firm control of the upper chamber when the 114th Congress convenes in January.

For Democrats, Saturday's outcome was yet another sobering reminder of their party's declining prospects in the South, a region they dominated for much of the 20th century. Dr Cassidy will join a fellow Louisiana Republican, David Vitter, in the Senate, making it the first time in 138 years that a Democrat from the state has not sat in the Senate.

Speaking to supporters at the Crowne Plaza Hotel here, Dr Cassidy said: "This victory happened because people in Louisiana voted for a government which serves us but does not tell us what to do. Thank y'all."

Read more from the original source:
Sweeping political change completed in US deep south