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In a highly charged political environment the Democratic controlled Senate after months of delay rejected the Keystone XL pipeline.

In a 59-41 vote, the Senate came within one vote of the 60 votes needed to pass the House-passed measure.  Failure to pass the measure was a severe blow to Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who is in a fight of her political life against GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy.

Politico reported Landrieu faced a noisy, well-organized environmental movement that made it personal against her from the start. About two-dozen greens protested outside her Washington home on Monday with a makeshift pipeline and pushed her colleagues into abandoning her all week long, until Landrieu’s path to victory appeared to come down to one of the Senate’s most liberal members, Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) — though he voted no in the end.

Bloomberg reported Democratic Senate leaders refused for years to bring the measure to the floor until sponsor Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, convinced them that a vote may bolster her chances in a Dec. 6 runoff election. The Republican-led House of Representatives passed the measure last week.

Tiernan Sittenfeld, the League of Conservation Voters’ senior VP for government affairs, hailed the pipeline’s latest setback. “Looking ahead, we are more confident than ever that this pipeline is never going to be built,” she said.

Politico continued in its reporting, Obama and his aides had spent much of the week signaling he would reject the legislation, though the White House’s refusal to issue a formal veto message gave pipeline backers reason to hope that the president might move in their direction. Press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday that Obama “doesn’t support” the bill, which would approve the $8 billion pipeline without waiting for the State Department to finish its review of the project, but added that the White House would “probably wait and see what happens in the Senate.”

The Keystone XL pipeline would have carried crude oil from Canada’s western tar sand’s to the U.S. Gulf Coast, which had environmentalists fighting against those who advocated U.S. energy independence.

Karen Harbert, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, said in a statement, “There have been no indications that the Obama administration will stop ignoring the vast majority of Americans that support the pipeline, but we do know that Keystone will have even stronger support in the next Congress.”

In its reporting Bloomberg reported Obama has deflected efforts to force a decision on Keystone, saying a State Department review should be allowed to proceed. The department is studying the project because it crosses an international border. The agency has suspended its review until a Nebraska court challenge over the route’s path in that state is settled.

The fight is not over as Republicans will bring this vote up again when they gain control of the Senate after November’s mid-term election.

The vote virtually destroyed any chance Senator Landrieu had to bolster her already slim chance of retaining her Senate seat in December’s 6th runoff election.