The Star’s endorsement for Missouri US Senator between Josh Hawley and Lucas Kunce | Opinion

Here is the U.S. Senate candidate we endorse for the general election. For more information about the Nov. 5 election, check out our Voter Guide.

You could in perfectly good conscience vote for Democratic Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Lucas Kunce, a former Marine, simply because he’s not the other guy.

The incumbent, Sen. Josh Hawley, as you may recall, started running for his current job right after winning the last one. And also right after promising he’d never do that.

Hawley deserves to lose, not only because he sprinted away from the seditionists he’d just encouraged on Jan. 6, but because what he mostly does is run his mouth. As the conservative columnist George Will once asked about our Mr. Hawley, “has there ever been such a high ratio of ambition to accomplishment?”

But Lucas Kunce also deserves to win, and you may be less aware of the affirmative case for his candidacy.

First, he seems to be running for a reason beyond personal ambition, not that every serious aspirant doesn’t need some of that, too.

Kunce, who is 41, grew up in a working-class neighborhood near Lincoln University of Missouri in Jeff City, and he watched his parents go bankrupt when his youngest sister needed a series of open-heart surgeries.

His dad worked for the state, for the Missouri Department of Conservation. But after his mother had to stop working to be a full-time caregiver, “we made it through that time,” he told us, only “because the people in our neighborhood, who didn’t have any more money than we did, they passed a plate down at my mom’s prayer group for us, they brought more food by the house than we could eat and really just took care of us. I’ve spent my entire life trying to pay them back.”

As what he calls an antitrust advocate, he’s trying to help change a political system in which even the simplest health care and other reforms are blocked by corporate interests and lobbies. And, of course, our willingness to be endlessly distracted from that fact.

Kunce knew a number of veterans growing up. So after graduation from Yale, where he studied Classics on a Pell grant and then earned a law degree from the University of Missouri, he followed one man he particularly admired from the neighborhood into the Marines.

In Iraq, he led a police training team on “dozens of missions outside the wire. I planned the missions, brought everybody home safe, thank God.” He also deployed to Afghanistan, twice, and “unfortunately not everybody made it home from those.”

When he did make it home, what he found made him angry. “I watched our country light trillions of dollars on fire supposedly nation-building over there while my old neighborhood completely fell apart. If you go back there now, the first house I lived in is an empty lot. The one everybody brought food by, that I joined the Marine Corps out of, is boarded up to keep the squatters out,” and the little store where the kids bought candy is closed because it had been robbed so often.

“And I think that’s because we’ve got a lot of politicians taking money from the wrong people. They don’t reinvest in our communities,” and don’t, as he often says of Hawley, bring dollars back to Missouri. “They don’t care about community development block grants. It’s just all about what money they can make on self-help books and whatever fame they can get.”

Kunce is referring, of course, to Hawley’s book about manhood, his show bills going nowhere and non-stop culture war food fights, none of which do anything for our state. So unfortunately, the Ferragamo fits, Senator.

Differences on Ukraine, women’s rights

Hawley’s challenger is not only smart but has already had a lot of life and leadership experience, and we believe that he deserves the chance to serve in Washington.

Their policy differences are stark: On Ukraine, for instance, Hawley always acts like we aren’t compensating St. Louis victims of nuclear radiation poisoning because we’re spending so much in Kyiv.

Of course, the one has nothing to do with the other. Here’s Kunce’s rejoinder, in their recent debate, to Hawley’s dig that he for one does not support the “Ukraine First” policies “of Lucas Kunce and his allies.”

“The No. 1 thing we need to do,” Kunce answered, “is make sure we do not put boots on the ground somewhere else. Our aid to Ukraine at $200 billion is infinitely cheaper than the $6.4 trillion we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan supporting nation building there.” Yes, yes and yes.

Kunce is also running hard on the idea that Missouri women should be able to make their own decisions, about abortion and more.

Kunce strongly supports Amendment 3. That ballot initiative would nullify Missouri’s current abortion ban and amend the state constitution, guaranteeing abortion access up until the point of viability. Contrary to Hawley’s false claims and lurid campaign ads, it would not overturn the state’s ban on surgeries for transgender minors without parental consent.

Hawley, who says he got into politics because of his opposition to abortion, was one of only nine Republicans who signed onto South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham’s bill to ban abortions after 15 weeks. Hawley says now that he does not support a nationwide ban, and has also said that there just aren’t the votes for such a thing, which doubtless makes his lack of support easier.

Kunce is not wrong when he says that Hawley has in the past asked whether we should rethink no-fault divorce. Hawley also, Kunce points out, voted nay on a 2022 roll call vote on the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which went into effect last year.

“He wants to decide how you get to live,” he told us. “He thinks he knows the right way. Nobody else’s opinion matters, and he’s going to tell you what to do. And he’s certainly not going to invest in you so that you can make your own decisions either.”

False attacks on immigrants

In his recent debate with Hawley, the sitting and sometimes scurrying senator said many untrue things, including repeatedly alleging that it’s because of Kunce and his allies that 15 million undocumented immigrants have entered the country in the last three years alone.

“Lucas Kunce wants amnesty for illegals in this country. That’s 15 million in the last three years. And then he wants to put them, after he’s given them the amnesty, on Social Security and Medicare.”

Fifteen million is around or even more than the total number of undocumented immigrants in the country, people who have arrived over many years and multiple administrations. In July of this year, the Pew Research Center said that as of 2022, the total was 11 million. The highest estimate of total undocumented immigrants in the country is about 16 million.

Not even the most virulently anti-immigrant demagogues have ever claimed that the number of people without documents has more than doubled during Biden’s presidency, but that’s what Hawley said, and no one corrected him.

“It’s absolutely nuts! It’s crazy,” Hawley kept saying during the debate. He said little to nothing about what he either had done or wanted to do, but only took swings at his challenger.

It’s also not true, Kunce says, that he wants to give all undocumented immigrants Medicare and other benefits, though it might come as a surprise to many Missouri voters that they’re not receiving them already.

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly blocked comprehensive immigration reform, and Hawley was among those who voted against the bipartisan 2024 bill that Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford called “by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades,” after Trump opposed it so he could complain about the border instead.

In fact, our only criticism of Kunce is that he’s more like Hawley in a couple of ways than we wish were the case: It’s unfortunate that he’s running an ad promising he’ll secure the border no matter who the president is, almost as if he doesn’t know that border crossings are at a four-year low. When people see that commercial, do they make the distinction between securing the border and closing it, which has already effectively happened?

A Kunce ad features guns, too, because what’s a Missouri political ad without some boom-boom? And when he and Hawley do their quien es mas macho on the seventh grade playground thing, as they did at the state fair, it’s truly depressing to behold.

Still, this is a full-throated endorsement.

Other Missouri candidates for the U.S. Senate are Better Party’s Jared Young, Green Party candidate Nathan Kline and Libertarian candidate W.C. Young, who doesn’t have a website or information online.

Both Young and Kline seem like good guys, and Young has some interesting thoughts about running as an independent, but a vote for anyone other than Kunce is a vote for Hawley.

This story was originally published October 6, 2024 at 5:06 AM.