Will Senate candidates debate?

BATON ROUGE (AP) — With only two months remaining before November’s election, the three major candidates in Louisiana’s U.S. Senate race have rarely appeared at the same events and never in a head-to-head debate. How many of those will happen remains unclear.
Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu, seeking a fourth term in office, has agreed to participate in five debates throughout the month of October, in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Monroe and Shreveport.
Republican and tea party favorite Rob Maness, a political newcomer who is running a distant third, has said he’ll participate in many more if the other candidates would only sign up.
The holdout for a confirmed debate schedule is Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, whose campaign has committed publicly to one match-up: an Oct. 14 debate in Shreveport to be televised statewide.
Cassidy’s campaign manager Joel DiGrado said in early August that the congressman would evaluate debate requests after the election sign-up.
That period ended more than two weeks ago, and Cassidy’s spokesman John Cummins refused Tuesday to answer questions about whether the congressman will square off with his fellow contenders in any other events besides the Shreveport debate.
Louisiana’s Senate race is being closely watched around the nation. Republicans consider Landrieu vulnerable, and she is targeted in a GOP effort to gain six Senate seats and retake the majority. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the Nov. 4 election, the race will head to a Dec. 6 runoff, becoming the last Senate seat to be decided across the country.
Landrieu’s campaign has repeatedly criticized Cassidy’s refusal to outline a debate schedule, calling it disrespectful to voters.
“Sen. Landrieu will be at a debate talking about the issues important to Louisianians, but voters are still waiting to hear if Congressman Cassidy will actually participate in that conversation or whether they will be presented with an empty chair,” Landrieu campaign spokesman Fabien Levy said in a statement.
Cassidy is taking on the role traditionally held by an incumbent, who often doesn’t want to raise a challenger’s profile by allowing too many face-to-face meetings. But LSU political science professor Robert Hogan said in Louisiana’s Senate race, Cassidy has the upper hand and doesn’t want to risk it.
Most polls show Landrieu with support well below 50 percent. The Democratic senator could use the debates, Hogan said, to remind voters of her achievements, while Maness could hit Cassidy with criticism that the congressman isn’t conservative enough.
“For Cassidy, everything is going his way and what can happen is he can have a mishap. He can say something wrong that can be turned into 30-second commercials in the last few weeks of the campaign,” Hogan said. “It’s an odd situation here. The challenger has the most to lose.”
Maness, a retired Air Force colonel running without the support of the GOP establishment, criticizes both Landrieu and Cassidy about the debate schedule, suggesting even Landrieu’s commitments to five candidate forums isn’t enough.
“From growing the economy to reforming our broken education system, Louisiana’s voters deserve to know where we stand and what we’ll fight for in Washington,” Maness said in a written statement.