Missouri U.S. Senate- Race of the Day

Missouri U.S. Senate

82 Days Until Election Day

Status: Republican Incumbent

2020 Presidential Result: Red State (Midwest)

Outlook: Likely Republican

I touched yesterday on the fact that Missouri is a whole lot more Republican than it used to be. That was very much in evidence six years ago, when despite it being a midterm election year for a nationally unpopular Republican President, Republican Josh Hawley defeated two term incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill by a solid margin. Hawley, who not long before became his state's Attorney General, was seen as a rising political star in Missouri and someone to keep an eye on for even higher office. Since joining the Senate, Hawley has abandoned any previous ties to establishment pre-Trump Republicans. While he has remained somewhat in that position by continuing to be very socially conservative, he has moved closer to an anti-internationalist approach to foreign policy and an anti-corporate populist approach on the economy. While the Senator may like to run for President one day, he would find himself competing with other young figures in the party who have adopted the same sort of views, such as JD Vance.

While few have doubted Hawley's intellect, his principles and judgment have been criticized by members of both parties. On January 6, 2021, he was famous seen as giving a raised fist salute to those who were gathering to march on Capitol Hill. Later on that day, when widespread violence broke out within the building, it has been pointed out that Hawley had to run for his own safety. Since then, he has gone out of his way to antagonize the left and there is nothing Democrats might like more than beating a very controversial opponent. However, in Missouri, that would be far easier said than done.

Hawley missed out by one day of becoming the first U.S. Senator to have been born in the 1980s. This year, he will face a slightly younger opponent in the nearly 42 year old Lucas Kunce, an attorney and United States Marine who did tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Democrat continues to serve in the Marine Corps Reserve.

While Kunce has some political advantages due to his biography, he is considered to be probably too far to the left to be the best possible general election candidate in the state. In 2022, he ran for Missouri's other Senate seat and was considered the front-runner, until a wealthy female candidate, considered more moderate emerged and narrowly beat him in the primary. That candidate probably did not run much better than Kunce would have in the general election, demonstrating a systemic problem facing Show Me State Democrats. In this cycle, Democrats at first seemed most excited about the prospect of St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, an African-American candidate. However, Bell decided he would have a better opportunity to run in a Congressional primary against controversial Congresswoman Cori Bush than he would against a controversial Republican Senator in a general election. That gambit paid off as Bell recently defeated Bush and is all but certain to be headed to Congress.

 

All of this pretty much ceded the field to Kuince, as party activists likely determined he had earned the opportunity. In this month's primary, he took 68 percent of the vote against his main competitor, African-American State Senator Karla May who took 23 percent. Two other minority female candidates took the remainder of the primary vote. While the outcome was never in doubt, it is likely Kunce lost the votes of some folks who had voted for him in the primary two years earlier when he was considered the anti-establishment option.

 

To be sure, there will be a lot of Missouri Democrats who will be highly motivated to vote against Josh Hawley. There will be a lot of donors from around the country who will send money to Kunce as he attempts to unseat him. There may even be some moderate Republican types who decide to vote for an Independent option on the ballot. However, Hawley is very much in the driver's seat. The candidate are sparring over debates. Kunce wants to have them more than Hawley for what would seem to be reasonable political reasons, but the two men had a bit of a verbal dust-up today in front of television cameras while they awkwardly placed hands on the other's shoulder at times at the State Fair. Hawley accused Kunce of running a "basement campaign" while Kunce followed his party's playbook by calling the Republican incumbent "weird" and "creepy." Hawley then challenged Kunce to a Missouri Farm Bureau hosted debate on the spot, which the Democrat rejected perhaps the organization had already formally endorsed Hawley.

There will probably be televised debates down the road, but any encounter today would not have exactly brought about comparisons to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Although, I suppose it is fair to say that Lincoln and Douglas both found each other weird and creepy as well.

U.S. Senate races predicted thus far:

10 D  (6 Safe, 1 Likely,  2 Leans, 1 Tossup)

 4 R   (2 Safe, 1 Likely, 1 Leans)

 

Total with predicted thus far:

38 Democrats (28 Holdover, 6 Safe, 1 Likely, 2 Leans, 1 Tossup)

42 Republicans (2 Safe, 1 Likely, 1 Leans, 38 Holdover)