KANSAS CITY, Mo. —Just months after a losing bid for U.S. Senate in Missouri, former Marine Lucas Kunce is launching another campaign — this time in an attempt to take down Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.
Kunce announced his new campaign Jan. 6, two years after Hawley objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election amid an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol and more than a year and a half before the 2024 election.
“When things get tough, Missourians deserve a U.S. senator who will stand up for them, not run away,” Kunce said in a Western-themed announcement video posted on Twitter, in a reference to a video showing Hawley running away from the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, 2021, during the insurrection. “That’s why I’m running to replace Josh Hawley.”
Hawley has been considered a potential presidential candidate in 2024, but has repeatedly said he plans to run for reelection to the U.S. Senate instead.
Kunce also got into the 2022 Senate campaign early in the race, and while he proved to be a prolific fundraiser, he struggled to get Missouri Democrats to coalesce around his campaign. He campaigned as a populist Democrat, focused on engaging the type of working class voters who have gravitated to the Republican Party.
He unsuccessfully ran for the state legislature in 2006 before joining the Marines. During his 2022 U.S. Senate run, Kunce struggled to win support from key figures in the Missouri Democratic Party.
Kunce lost the primary by 5 percentage points to Trudy Busch Valentine, a member of the wealthy Busch family who entered the race shortly before the filing deadline and enjoyed the backing of the state’s Democratic establishment.
Hawley is often reviled among Democrats and is a polarizing figure in the national political scene. But he remains popular among Missouri Republicans.
After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he became a pariah in the Republican Party as members of his own party and former supporters started to denounce his role as the first senator to say they would object to the certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
Hawley’s critics say the Missouri senator’s actions helped fuel the combustible atmosphere, which culminated in a mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters storming the Capitol in an attempt to block certification.
But as Trump maintained his grip on the Republican Party, Hawley was able to quadruple his fundraising total between 2020 and 2021. When the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol showed a video of Hawley fleeing from the Senate on the day of the attack, he fundraised off of it by selling mugs that used an image of him pumping his fist to protesters that day.
In the announcement video, Kunce painted a contrast between his upbringing and Hawley’s. Kunce grew up in a family that struggled to make ends meet and he attended Yale on a Pell Grant, which is reserved for low-income families, and then law school at the University of Missouri. He points out that Hawley attended the elite Rockhurst High School in Kansas City before heading to Stanford and Yale Law School.
Still, both have connections in their populist circles. Hawley has consulted on tech policy with Matt Stoller of the American Economics Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank. Stoller frequently promoted Hawley’s efforts during his first two years in the Senate. Kunce worked for the think tank under Stoller.
“We work with senators on both sides of the aisle,” Kunce told The Star in 2021 when asked about the connection. “And Josh Hawley is one of the ones who has come to us.”
Missouri has become an increasingly conservative state since it voted against President Barack Obama in 2008. Hawley was able to defeat Democratic incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill by more than 5 percentage points in 2018. In 2022, Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt defeated Busch Valentine by more than 13 percentage points.
In the aftermath of the election when Democrats were able to maintain control of the U.S. Senate and Republicans won a narrow majority of the U.S. House, Hawley called for reforms in the Republican Party to court the type of rural, conservative, working class voter that has largely become his party’s base.
In speeches over the past two years, Hawley has emphasized traditional, heterosexual relationships in attempts to make a moral, religious argument about conservative values. He is writing a book called “Manhood” about what he believes is a decline in American masculinity.
Kunce, too, has courted a working class base, arguing that the traditional institutions in Washington have failed rural communities. As a veteran, he was able to gain attention through criticizing the Biden administration’s foreign policy decisions.
Hawley has been a frequent critic of the Biden administration’s foreign policy to the point where he has slowed the administration from filling several vacancies in the Department of Defense. He has argued that the military should be more focused on China than Russia and opposed recent spending bills providing support for Ukraine and skipped Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelenskyy’s joint address to Congress last month.
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