When Bobby Jindal bowed out of the 2016 presidential race last week, he seemed determined to drag his long-time foe, Senator David Vitter, down with him. The two Louisiana Republicans have bitterly feuded with each other for years, both out of personal animus and for supremacy in the state party, and that rivalry has now concluded with both of their political careers in shambles.

Last Tuesday, just four days before Vitter’s run-off election for governor—a job the senator has long coveted—Jindal announced his withdrawal from the 2016 field, diverting the Louisiana media’s attention from Vitter’s last-ditch attempts to overcome his polling deficit by rabble-rousing about keeping Syrian refugees out of Louisiana. The Jindal news was also an untimely reminder to voters of just how deeply they loathe their current Republican governor. On Saturday, Vitter lost by a 12-point margin to Democrat John Bel Edwards, then announced he wouldn’t be running for re-election next year to the Senate, either.

The last-minute distraction was just one of the many ways that Jindal helped to doom Vitter’s campaign for governor—which was, at first, so widely expected to succeed that some Louisiana Democrats didn’t want the party to put up a candidate at all. Despite the 2007 prostitution scandal in which Vitter was found on the phone records of the so-called “D.C. Madam,” he’d cruised to victory in his 2010 Senate race, seeming to render his “very serious sin” irrelevant; he had loads of funding and widespread name recognition his opponents lacked. This race was also supposed to be unwinnable for Louisiana Democrats, who came up woefully short of re-electing Senator Mary Landrieu a year ago and have been generally left for dead.

But Vitter struggled to survive the hard hits of two serious Republican challengers in the primary (including one Jindal protege) and limped into the runoff with a wide array of political vulnerabilities. His Democrat opponent was a pro-gun, anti-choice West Point grad and state legislator who released a brutal ad over the prostitution scandal. Vitter was so loathed by some factions of the Louisiana GOP for his sharp-elbowed efforts to become the state party’s kingmaker that one of his GOP primary opponents, Jay Dardenne, went so far as to endorse Edwards. But Vitter’s biggest liabilities lay with Jindal’s own failures—not as a presidential candidate, but as a two-term governor. Jindal made the “R” beside Vitter’s name on the ballot a handicap rather than a help, even in a deeply red state.

Jindal has been massively unpopular as governor, with a current job-approval rating of just 20 percent. That’s in large part because his governance was an economic disaster. He and the GOP-controlled legislature dragged Louisiana into a budget crisis of massive proportions: The state is currently facing a $500 million shortfall, and that gap is expected to balloon to $1 billion next year. Some of the state’s woes could be chalked up to bigger structural forces: The recession hit just as post-Hurricane Katrina aid was being phased out; more recently, the plummeting price of oil has devastated Louisiana’s energy sector. But Jindal exacerbated the fiscal crisis by refusing to raise taxes and pushing through tax cuts and huge corporate tax giveaways that shrank government revenues just as state needed them the most in a faltering economy. Corporate tax exemptions have doubled from $1 billion to $2 billion since Jindal took office, according to an analysis by The Advocate. That includes a huge giveaway to Hollywood studios, in which taxpayers pay for 30% of the cost of movies made in the state—including the whopping salaries paid to actors.