Rob Maness

Robert Leon Maness, known as Rob Maness (born November 14, 1961), is a retired colonel in the United States Air Force and a Republican and Tea Party figure in his adopted U.S. state of Louisiana. His political action committee called Gator PAC is active in many state campaigns, including the unsuccessful effort in 2015 to make U.S. Senator David Vitter the new Louisiana governor.

Born to a military family in Fort Lewis, Washington, Maness was an unsuccessful Republican U.S. Senate candidate in 2014. He lost out to fellow Republican Bill Cassidy of Baton Rouge, who unseated then sitting Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of New Orleans. Maness endorsed Cassidy in the runoff contest against Landrieu. Maness was endorsed in the primary election by the Senate Conservatives Fund and such luminaries as former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States. Maness polled 202,556 votes (13.8 percent).

Vitter supported Cassidy in the 2014 campaign, but Maness endorsed Vitter to succeed fellow Republian Bobby Jindal as governor. Jindal was meanwhile an unsuccessful contender for his party's 2016 presidential nomination. Maness has been mentioned as a potential Senate candidate once more in 2016, when Vitter's second term in the body expires. Upon his defeat for governor, Vitter announced that he will not seek a third term in the Senate.

Maness received his bachelor's degree from the University of Tampa in Tampa, Florida, and his master's degree from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He attended the Air Command and Staff College and the College of Naval Warfare. He and his wife, Candace, reside in Madisonville in St. Tammany Parish in suburban New Orleans. The couple has five children.

In December 2015, Maness announced his candidacy in 2016 for the other U.S. Senate seat from Louisiana, the one being vacated by the incumbent David Vitter, who lost the governorship to Democrat John Bel Edwards. With 90,812 votes (5 percent), Maness finished sixth in the primary election on November 8, 2016, held in conjunction with the presidential election in which Donald Trump handily carried the state. Maness ran 112,000 votes in 2016 behind his 2014 showing. The two leading candidates, state Treasurer John Neely Kennedy, a Democrat-turned-Republican, and veteran Democratic former state senator and current Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, compete in a December 10 runoff election for the right to succeed Vitter. Eliminated in the primary were Republican U.S. Representatives Charles Boustany of Lafayette and John Fleming of Minden, who gave up safe House seats for the uncertain Senate race, and David Duke, a former figure in the Ku Klux Klan, who joined the GOP in 1989. Duke received 58,581 votes (3 percent).

Maness, who finished some 112,000 votes behind his 2014 Senate showing, had been urged to drop out of the race and support Fleming, who led in six parishes but finished a distant fifth in the voting. Maness is now seeking a position with the incoming Trump administration in Washington, D.C.