(Hawley’s office declined to comment for this story.)Įven though Republican pollsters recently found Kunce losing, 40 percent to 47 percent, against the current GOP frontrunner, former Gov. Both of them, furthermore, went to Yale - though Kunce emphasizes that he did so with financial aid. Although Kunce does not share Hawley’s worries about corporate “wokeness,” both men blame multinational corporations, Big Tech, China and elites for what ails America in general and Missouri in particular. But in rhetoric if not in backstory, it can be hard to tell the two apart. Don’t even get Kunce started on Hawley’s recent comments decrying video games and the state of American masculinity ( Marines play video games, Kunce points out).
Kunce dislikes the comparison - he considers Hawley a “fake populist,” pointing to the senator’s upbringing (son of a banker, private-school grad) and votes to confirm “corporate judges” (he named Neil Gorsuch, though Hawley was not in the Senate when Gorsuch was confirmed). In this, he can sound remarkably like the more-famous Missouri populist who won a Senate seat with a similar-sounding message: Republican Josh Hawley. And no matter if the issue is war in the Middle East, agriculture in the Midwest or pretty much anything else, his appeal to unity is this: Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you’re all getting screwed. Last quarter, Kunce outraised all his opponents in the race, Republicans included. elites lied about the war for 20 years and defense contractors got rich while communities like his hometown decayed. Nine months ahead of the 2022 primary, he has attracted national attention and cable-news spots for his blistering critiques of the war in Afghanistan, where he deployed twice - Kabul’s collapse, he says, was inevitable U.S. Hence, his pitch: Kunce is a Democrat, yes, but he prefers to call himself a populist, and he’s hoping a campaign against “big corporations and corrupt politicians,” on behalf of American workers hurt by globalization and monopoly power, will have enough appeal across partisan and racial divides to put him over the top. But so many people around the state, he says, feel the same powerlessness he did as a teenager - that they’re part of a system that insists on keeping them down, no matter how hard they try.
He is seeking a seat Republicans have held since 1987, when Kunce, now a tall, long-limbed 39-year-old who favors hoodies and talks with his hands, was a toddler. Finally, a wealthier boy took note: “Hey! Did you guys see Kunce’s new shoes?”įrom there, back in the car, a self-conscious kid’s socks become a political parable that explains why Kunce thinks a state former President Donald Trump won by 15 points in 2020 might just send him, a Democrat who has never held elected office, to the Senate. “I’m, like, strutting through the school, hoping someone will notice,” he recalls. Heading into eighth grade, Kunce got a pair of spotless white Reeboks, a source of serious pride for a teenaged boy in the late 1990s. But every year before school started, he and his siblings got to pick out new shoes from Payless. As he tells people on the campaign trail, he grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Jefferson City, the state capital, where medical bills related to his little sister’s heart condition at one point bankrupted his family. Kunce ( pronounced “Koontz,” he says, “and the other way will get you in a lot of trouble, so be real careful about that”) does not come from money. Senate seat in this very Republican state - is explaining Missouri voters by way of a story about socks. LOUIS - Steering a Ford Focus through soggy mist toward the northeast Missouri farm town of Palmyra, Lucas Kunce - Marine veteran, millennial, populist Democratic contender for a U.S.
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