2016 United States Senate election in Louisiana

The 2016 United States Senate election in Louisiana took place on November 8, 2016, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the State of Louisiana, concurrently with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well as other elections to the United States Senate in other states and elections to the United States House of Representatives and various state and local elections. Under Louisiana's "jungle primary" system, all candidates appeared on the same ballot, regardless of party, and voters could vote for any candidate. Since no candidate received a majority of the vote during the primary election, a runoff election was held December 10 between the top two candidates in the primary, Republican John Neely Kennedy and Democrat Foster Campbell, where Kennedy won with 60.65% of the vote, becoming the first non-incumbent Republican Senator in the state since Reconstruction, giving Senate Republicans 52 seats in the 115th Congress. Louisiana is the only state that has a jungle primary system (California and Washington have a similar "top two primary" system). Incumbent Republican Senator David Vitter unsuccessfully ran for Governor of Louisiana in 2015, and in his concession speech he announced that he would not seek re-election to the Senate in 2016. In addition to Kennedy and Campbell, four other candidates — Republicans Charles Boustany, John Fleming, and David Duke, and Democrat Caroline Fayard — qualified to participate at a debate at Dillard University, a historically black college, on November 2, 2016