Lucas Kunce says he’s the man who can beat Josh Hawley for Missouri Senate. Could he?

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Lucas Kunce entered the general election on Tuesday night asking for money.

“This is our one shot to defeat Josh Hawley,” Kunce said in a fundraising pitch shared on social media. “To take this Senate seat back for real Missourians. To restore our freedoms and rebuild Missouri. And we won’t waste it. Join our team and let’s get it done.”

The Missouri Democrat’s Senate campaign began with a video, launched on Jan. 6, 2023, highlighting Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s actions during the U.S. Capitol riot in 2021. It will end in November, when Missourians will decide whether they want to send Hawley back to Washington.

Over the past two years, Kunce raised more than $11 million from people in all 50 states, promoting himself as the candidate to take down Hawley.

But Missouri is a Republican state.

Since Hawley was elected to the Senate in 2018, defeating two-term Democrat Claire McCaskill, Missouri voters have not elected a Democrat to statewide office.

Instead, over the past six years, statewide elections have largely been decided in Republican primaries, as the Republican Party bolsters its strength in the rural and small-town areas that make up much of the state.

“I believe in Missouri today, with the current economic environment, the kind of political environment, and with Donald Trump being the nominee, it’s impossible for Kunce to win,” said James Harris, a Republican consultant. “He’s going to lose.”

Democrats aren’t so convinced. Hawley’s time in office has been as defined by his lightning rod-like ability to attract national attention for culture war issues as it has for his stances on policy. They hope Hawley’s personal opposition to abortion rights will hurt him in an election where abortion rights could literally be on the ballot in the form of a constitutional amendment to overturn Missouri’s abortion ban.

But even Democrats who think Kunce is running a good campaign, like former Missouri state senator Jeff Smith, acknowledge the difficulty of winning in November.

“There’s a shot, but it’s definitely an uphill battle,” Smith said. “He knew it coming in and it hasn’t gotten any easier.”

Asked about how he’ll win over Missourians who have increasingly been voting for Republican candidates the morning after the election, Kunce told The Star it came back to Hawley.

“We can just talk about Josh Hawley,” Kunce said. “The guy only got 51% of the vote in 2018” while running as a more traditional Republican.

“Now, he’s a complete villain who wants to take away everybody’s rights,” he added.

Ruby Red Missouri

Missouri voters were already gravitating toward Republicans when former President Donald Trump announced his campaign for president in 2016. But as Trump’s brash and unorthodox approach swept through the country and fundamentally altered the Republican Party, Missourians seemed eager to hop on board.

He won Missouri that year by 18.5 percentage points, in part by appealing to working-class voters angry at the direction the country was headed. Two years later, Hawley ran on a similar message — and beat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill by nearly six percentage points.

“Trump began that movement,” Harris said. “I think Josh Hawley is, in his own way, taking it on in a new facet.”

While Trump lost the presidency in 2020, he still won Missouri by 15.4 percentage points in that campaign. Two years later, Sen. Eric Schmitt won his election by around 13 percentage points.

The double digit margins indicate that Republicans have a significant advantage when it comes to statewide elections – particularly elections when the focus is on national issues like in a presidential election year.

While Democrats appear to have a new surge of energy with the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, it’s unlikely Harris will be able to do what President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama failed to do — win Missouri.

That means Kunce would have to win over Trump voters to have a chance at defeating Hawley.

“It’s just a high percentage of people you’re going to have to get to split their ticket, because it’s unlikely that Vice President Harris can keep it within single digits in Missouri,” Smith said. “So that’s just, it’s a huge challenge.”

Early in the campaign, Hawley has been doing his best to play into his national strength. In his first campaign rally of the general election, Hawley excoriated the Democratic policies of the Biden administration and frequently conflated Biden’s policies with Kunce’s policies — going as far as to claim that Kunce has been in power over the past four years even though Hawley is the incumbent.

“It’s a referendum on (Kunce) and his friends and their policies,” Hawley said during an event in Ozark, where he has his Missouri residence. “I mean, he has been in power, he and his friends, their policies have been in power for four years and running now. I mean, Biden, Kamala, Nancy Pelosi, everything I talked about up there on that podium, they have been doing. He wants to do that and more.”

Kunce, in an interview, frequently avoided weighing in on the presidential campaign, saying he was focused on Hawley and Missouri. The only other statewide campaign he invoked was the potential ballot measure on abortion — an issue where Democrats have frequently won support since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

James Harris, the Republican consultant, downplayed the impact of abortion on the race — Democrats also said abortion could help former Democratic nominee Trudy Busch Valentine win in 2022 — saying that he felt the people motivated to vote based on abortion rights are already motivated because Trump is at the top of the ticket.

“I think Kunce’s message gets, to some extent, drowned out by the environment,” he said. “And I think a lot of people are just voting for Republicans. I don’t see him drawing people out to vote.”

A little bit of luck

Former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander is the Democrat who has come the closest to winning a Senate seat in the past decade.

In 2016, Kander came within 3 percentage points of defeating former Sen. Roy Blunt, a conservative who never appeared at ease in the Trump era. Aided by an anti-establishment turn in the electorate and a television ad showing him assembling a rifle that went viral — Kander raised millions to spread his moderate Democratic message.

Yet he still came up short.

“The state, it is what it is,” Smith said. “And you have to do more than just run a really good campaign. You’ve got to have everything break your way. But he’s put himself in position if he can have a viral moment. He’s put himself in position if Josh has a slip up.”

Already, Kunce has been able to raise significant amounts of campaign cash – repeatedly outraising Hawley in individual fundraising quarters, often in small donations from Democrats across the country who dislike Hawley.

But while Kunce built a fundraising machine over the past four years — he raised more than a million in the 2022 Democratic primary for Senate before losing to Busch Valentine — he has gotten little support from the national Democratic Party.

Democrats are trying to maintain their narrow control in the Senate – they currently hold 51 seats compared to the Republicans’ 49. But Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat turned independent from Trump-heavy West Virginia, announced his retirement. And two other Democratic senators from Republican-leaning states — Sen. Sherrod Brown from Ohio and Sen. Jon Tester from Montana — are up for reelection this year.

That means Kunce’s race falls farther down the list of priorities for national Democrats. Smith broke the Senate races into tiers and said Missouri’s race won’t be in the top tier unless Kunce can find a way to attract significant national attention.

“That’s hard to do because there’s seven or eight other people who are talented in other states fighting to move their race into that tier too,” Smith said. “The good thing Lucas has going for him is that a couple of the states he’s competing against to become a nationally funded race are so expensive that it will probably discourage the DSCC from competing.”

Even an influx of money may not help unseat an incumbent in a red state. In 2018, Democratic candidates in Kentucky, Maine and South Carolina attracted millions of donations in their attempts to take down nationally unpopular Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins and Lindsay Graham.

All three of the candidates fell short by at least 8 percentage points.

Kunce is undeterred. He pointed to an endorsement from the Missouri State Council of Fire Fighters, a group that has supported Republicans in previous elections, to show that he’s winning over Republican-leaning voters. And he said Hawley has taken unpopular stances that limit people’s freedoms, particularly on abortion.

“We were on track to win this race a year ago,” Kunce said. “We were on track to win it a month ago. We’re on track to win it right now. We’ve built a real coalition in this state.”