Josh Hawley thinks “masculinity” is under attack, but his Marine Veteran contender for Missouri Senate isn’t playing culture war games

Photo Courtesy of Lucas Kunce’s Campaign

2024 U.S. Senate contender Lucas Kunce is proud to have never held elected office. The attorney and 13-year Marine veteran frequently emphasizes this is not a source of weakness—rather, there’s greater political value for the people of Missouri from a man who hasn’t been bought and sold while climbing the political ladder.

“The one thing that I’m proud to not have done is take money from these corporate PACs, federal lobbyists, and people like that, so that they’ve had a bug in my ear for decades,” he says.

Instead, he stressed that the chief strength of his military and professional background is that he knows how to deliver on a promise.

“I think that being a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps is a pretty high office in our federal government,” he says. “I’ve worked with the interagency. I’ve done arms control negotiations overseas. I’ve done procurement at the national level. I know how a lot of these things work, and how to get results within overly complex bureaucracy, where someone else wouldn’t.”

Photo Courtesy of Lucas Kunce’s Campaign

Kunce first ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, coming in second to Trudy Busch Valentine in the primary election with 38.3% of the vote. Though he ran as a Democrat—and is doing so again this time around—Kunce more often refers to himself as a populist, which he defines as someone who wants to “fundamentally change who has power in this country.” With over $2.5 million raised in the first quarter of 2024 and nearly $2.8 million raised in the second quarter, it seems Kunce’s populist message is resonating with Missouri voters.

As he often points out, Kunce’s brand of populism is informed by his upbringing and military experience. He calls his background a “typical mid-Missouri story.” His parents married at 19 and 22 years old, and raised their four children in a Catholic household in a working-class neighborhood of Jefferson City.

”When you follow the rules like they did, it’s kid, kid, kid, kid, and a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle,” Kunce says of his Catholic upbringing. However, his parents were forced to stop at four children when his youngest sister was born with a heart condition that required three open-heart surgeries and eventually left them bankrupt.

Photo Courtesy of Lucas Kunce’s Campaign

Throughout this period, the family received extensive support from neighbors, one of the most helpful being a Marine who often brought Kunce to the local Marine Corps League. There, he met veterans of the Vietnam War who remained committed to helping their communities despite their hardships and feelings of betrayal by their country. This inspired Kunce to join the Marine Corps in 2007, three years after graduating from Yale, where he attended on a Pell Grant.

Kunce was later deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He shares one story about his time in the latter country that was particularly formative. While he was stationed at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province, a group of defense contractors were building a metal building nearby, much to the chagrin of the Marine General and Afghanistan’s government. Both felt the building would be unnecessary and a potential magnet for terrorists. Kunce says the structure was built anyway, only for it to go to waste.

“The general and the government were both wrong because the Taliban didn’t even care about it,” he says. “It ended up being shredded by metal scrappers who took it over. That’s millions of dollars in a corrupt system that goes to nothing.”

Photo Courtesy of Lucas Kunce’s Campaign

Kunce remains calm and levelheaded when discussing these experiences, eschewing the anger and resentment that’s typically associated with populism. Still, he’s more than willing to call people out where he sees fit, and he’s especially willing to do so when it comes to his Republican competitor, Senator Josh Hawley.

In the past, Kunce has called Hawley a “fake populist,” pointing to the Republican senator’s past support of right-to-work laws, and his ‘no’ vote on a bill to establish a national right to in vitro fertilization last month. Though Hawley says his stance on right-to-work has changed and calls himself “pro-IVF” despite his vote on the bill, Kunce remains skeptical.

He has also criticized Hawley’s introduction of a 2023 bill to ban lawmakers from trading stocks. Kunce is all for a congressional stock trading ban, but, to him, Hawley’s initial proposal did not go far enough, as it still allowed members of Congress to place their holdings in a blind trust for the remainder of their time in office.

Photo Courtesy of Lucas Kunce’s Campaign

Hawley and a bipartisan group of Senators recently unveiled a new proposal directing lawmakers to divest from individual assets by 2027 and put them into mutual funds instead. Under the recent Senate proposal, a failure to divest would lead to fines of either the value of the lawmaker’s monthly salary or 10% of the value of each of their assets that violates the law.

According to the current law, lawmakers are fined $200 for not reporting trades over $1,000 within the deadline period of 45 days. While the new proposal expands penalties and removes the blind trust loophole, Kunce does not think it goes far enough.

“He saw what we said about it, and was like, ‘Oh, they got me,’ and he’s trying to do another thing,” Kunce says. “But when you look at the penalties on that, it’s basically nothing…(Congressional stock trading) should just be criminal. You, me, or Martha Stewart—if we go to jail, these guys should go to jail too.”

Photo Courtesy of Lucas Kunce’s Campaign

While recent polls indicate a lead by Hawley, Kunce remains confident he can win if nominated, pointing to his campaign’s out-fundraising of Hawley’s in 2023, and the millions of dollars he’s raised throughout 2024. Kunce says his opponent espouses an “agenda of control,” which he argues is at odds with what the majority of Missourians want.

“The last thing Missourians want—from the dude in mid-Missouri who likes to smoke weed on his back porch in the evenings, to a woman who wants reproductive care—is to be told what to do by politicians and to be controlled by them,” Kunce says.