John Fleming's loss to Julia Letlow in the June 27 runoff wasn't just a defeat for one candidate. It was Louisiana voters rejecting the coalition standing behind him, and the wreckage that coalition left behind tells you exactly what it was really about.
For months, groups like Save My Louisiana (SML), the Louisiana Citizens Advocacy Group (LACAG), and the LA CO2 Alliance branded themselves as grassroots conservatives defending landowners from carbon capture pipelines. But strip away the branding and what's left looks a lot less like conservatism and a lot more like the broader anti-CCS movement's real playbook: opposition not just to CCS, but to industrial development, energy infrastructure, and economic growth generally, dressed up in property-rights language to make it palatable in rural, red parishes.
The money trail matches that pattern. The Pelican Institute has documented $115.5 million flowing into Louisiana's anti-oil-and-gas network from out-of-state funders since 2020, roughly 98 percent of everything these groups have collected. That's not a grassroots landowner movement. That's a national environmental coalition financing a Republican messenger.
And when the mask slipped in June, it slipped hard. LACAG published an infographic accusing its own ally, the LA CO2 Alliance, of running fake bot accounts, after the LA CO2 Alliance had asked LACAG multiple times to check its work. The wife of LACAG's founder called the group a vehicle for a fake network instead of walking it back, and LA CO2 Alliance said they were “pissed” and called it BS.
That wasn't isolated. House Natural Resources Chairman Brett Geymann turned on the movement after it turned on him, saying grassroots movements collapse from the inside once allies get treated like enemies. Congressman Clay Higgins was branded "Captain Snowflake" after he demanded Fleming apologize for circulating a doctored AI video of Julia Letlow. SML fired off an open letter calling him disloyal unless he backed down. He didn't. Fleming never apologized, and Higgins endorsed Letlow instead.
Meanwhile, Fleming's own supporters were caught openly urging Democrats to re-register Republican just to vote for him, while others in the same Facebook threads cheered each other toward backing Democrat Jamie Davis over Trump-endorsed Letlow. The Sierra Club's Angelle Bradford was right there applauding it.
That's the real tell. A movement that will trade a Trump-endorsed Republican for a Democrat. It was a left-aligned coalition that found a convenient host in Fleming, and Louisiana voters saw through it. Letlow's win, and Fleming's collapse, was the message, and it's worth watching whether these groups actually take the hint or simply regroup under a new banner.
That new banner is already being stitched together, aimed at whatever comes next for Louisiana's economy – data centers, LNG terminals, or SpaceX launches – because standing in the way was always the point.
