Lucas Kunce could well determine the fate and the future of American democracy. A Marine Corps veteran who served a tour of duty in Iraq and two in Afghanistan before a stint as an arms control negotiator, Kunce in recent years has emerged as one of the country’s most passionate and effective critics of corporate monopolies and economic inequality.
As a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, he’s mounting a populist challenge to Republican Senator Josh Hawley. Missouri hasn’t backed a Democrat for President since 1996, and the state—which supported Donald Trump in 2020 by a fifteen-point margin—is likely to get behind the Republican nominee again in 2024. But Kunce makes a compelling case that his appeals for economic justice, abortion rights, and civil rights, and the support he’s received from organized labor, uniquely position him to upset Hawley.
That’s what candidates in uphill races usually say, of course. But Kunce’s assertion involves more than the typical election-year hyperbole. A number of observers have identified the forty-one-year-old former director of national security policy at the progressive American Economic Liberties Project as one of the best Democratic prospects to upset a Republican incumbent in this year’s race for control of the Senate.
Although Kunce refuses to accept contributions from corporate political action committees, he outraised Hawley in the third quarter of 2023, and a poll released in November put him within four points of the incumbent. “For anyone who cares about democracy, reproductive freedom, health care access, and working families, this race should be a priority,” former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, who also once ran for Senate, said of Kunce’s growing momentum. For national Democrats—whose goal of retaining Senate control in the 2024 elections won’t be easy—candidates in tough races like the one Kunce is in must be priorities. The party’s 51-49 majority is tenuous, and the map of races is weighted against them. Of the thirty-four seats up for grabs—in thirty-three regular contests and a special election in Nebraska—Democrats need to defend twenty-three, while the Republicans have to worry about only eleven. (A special election in California to fill the last few months of the late Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein’s term is likely to go to the Democrats.)
But those are just the daunting top-line numbers. When attention turns to individual races, things get even tougher. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is standing down in West Virginia, a state where Trump won 69 percent of the vote in 2020, and where Manchin is the last prominent Democrat holding on to a statewide seat. Every independent analysis of the competition suggests the West Virginia Senate seat is likely to flip to a Republican.
Of the thirty-four Senate seats up for grabs, Democrats need to defend twenty-three, while the Republicans have to worry about only eleven.
Another Democratic caucus member, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, is talking about running for re-election as an Independent. This self-serving move could split the Democratic vote in the closely divided state and hand the seat to a rightwing Republican like Kari Lake, who lost a 2022 bid for the governor’s office.
If Democrats were to lose just those two seats, they could find themselves as the minority party in the Senate in 2025. In practical political terms, that would mean that, should President Joe Biden win a second term, he would serve at least two years as a lame-duck President, struggling to fill Cabinet and judicial posts. He would also be at the mercy of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on budget issues and foreign policy.
Arguably even more concerning is the prospect of Biden losing to Trump, who, with a Republican-controlled Senate, would be able to fill Cabinet posts and judicial openings with MAGA Republicans and advance schemes to remake the federal government as an engine for his authoritarian agenda.
Unfortunately for Democrats, however, West Virginia and Arizona are not the only vulnerable states. Two other Democratic incumbents in the Senate—Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana—are running in states where Trump won big in 2016 and 2020 and is likely to win in 2024.
Brown and Tester are competent contenders with deep roots in their states. They have beaten the odds in the past. But it will be a heavy lift this November, as both Senators will have credible Republican opponents, both will be targeted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and conservative political action committees, and both will need to convince a lot of voters to split their tickets at a time when political divisions are running deeper than at any point in modern American history.
One other Democratic incumbent, Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen, also appears vulnerable. Nevada backed Biden in 2020, but only by a narrow 2 percent margin. In 2022, Nevada voters replaced a Democratic governor with a Republican. That same year saw Nevada Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto re-elected by only 8,000 votes.
Looking to 2024, Rosen can expect a tough race against not only a Republican Senate nominee, but also Trump. “Trump knows Nevada is the key to flipping Senate and White House control,” Rosen warned in a recent fundraising appeal. “We’re expecting him to lie through his teeth to try to flip our state red.”
Democratic Senators in two other battleground states—Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania—will also face pressure from Trump, who is determined not just to win a second presidential term but also to inherit a Senate that is at his service. Luckily for Baldwin and Casey, Republicans have struggled to find top-tier challengers. But even if Baldwin and Casey ultimately coast to re-election, Democratic strategists are still looking at an unsettling map.
With Manchin’s seat probably gone, and with four or five additional Democratic seats at risk, the party must face the reality that, if anything goes wrong for any Democratic incumbent in a swing state or one that’s been trending toward the Republicans, the Senate will most likely be lost.
The only way to avoid that fate is by winning Republican-held seats. The problem for Democrats is that most of the Republican Senators who are seeking re-election in 2024 are running in contests that analysts rate as “solidly Republican.” And where Republican-held seats have opened up—with the decisions by Utah Senator Mitt Romney to exit politics and by Indiana Senator Mike Braun to quit Washington for a home-state gubernatorial bid—they’re in states that are unlikely to flip to blue.
With that said, Democrats do have solid candidates running against three of the least popular Republican Senators who will be up for re-election in 2024. U.S. Representative Colin Allred, a former National Football League linebacker who later held several posts in the Obama Administration and was elected to Congress from a Dallas-area district in 2018, is generally seen as the front-runner among a number of Democrats vying to take on Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.
Scandal-plagued and unpopular with many of his fellow Republicans, Cruz beat former U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke by just two points in 2018 and has since been criticized for fleeing Texas to hang out in Cancún, Mexico, while a February 2021 power-grid crisis during a winter storm left hundreds dead.
“The struggles of regular Texans just don’t interest him,” Allred says of Cruz, a message that’s likely to resonate with voters. But will it be enough in a state where no Democrat has won a statewide race since 1994?
The party’s prospects are perhaps a little better in Florida, where former U.S. Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is mounting an energetic Democratic challenge to Republican incumbent Rick Scott.
“Florida is one of the Republican-held seats where Democrats could try to go on offense this cycle,” a recent analysis by Roll Call argued. That’s true, at least in part, because Scott has sent mixed signals about his support for Social Security and Medicare—popular programs in a state with a large population of politically engaged older voters.
And then there’s Kunce. Missouri is an even tougher state for Democrats than Florida or Texas. Trump carried the Sunshine State in 2020 by just under four points and the Lone Star State by a little over five points. In contrast, he won the Show-Me State by more than fifteen points. So any Democrat running in Missouri faces an uphill climb.
But Kunce brings strengths to the race. In his bid for the Senate in 2022, he finished a solid second in that year’s Democratic primary. That has given him name recognition and a base of supporters that includes former U.S. Representative Bill Clay Sr., an iconic figure in the history of St. Louis civil rights activism, and Shalonda Webb, the popular chairwoman of the St. Louis County Council. He has also gained endorsements from the Missouri AFL-CIO, the Missouri State Council of Fire Fighters, the Missouri State Council of Machinists, the St. Louis Building and Construction Trades Council, the Greater Kansas City Building and Construction Trades Council, and United Food and Commercial Workers Local 655, Missouri’s largest private-sector local union.
This support is expected to help Kunce secure the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat against several less well-known challengers, including state Senator Karla May—just as Allred must first win his Texas Democratic primary against a number of rivals, including state Senator Roland Gutierrez, before taking on Cruz. But it will take more than endorsements from prominent Democrats and labor unions to flip Missouri’s Senate seat. To that end, Kunce and his supporters say they’ve charted a path to victory: The Democrat will lean into the abortion rights debate, where his pro-choice stance is at odds with Hawley’s social conservatism.
Abortion rights activists in Missouri, where most abortions are now illegal, hope to place a pro-choice referendum on the November 2024 ballot that could mobilize young voters who lean Democratic. Pro-choice referendums have won in a number of Republican states since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022.
“In the Senate, I’ll fight like hell to end the filibuster and guarantee abortion access for all so people get their power back,” Kunce wrote on X (formerly Twitter). Kunce could get a significant boost if the issue is on the Missouri ballot next fall.
“So what’s the difference between corporate elites and hungry Missouri kids? Kids don’t write campaign checks.” — Lucas Kunce
But what most distinguishes Kunce from many other Democratic Senate candidates is his resolute focus on a critique of corporate power that could pry loose at least some working-class voters who have been attracted by Trump’s opposition to bipartisan free-trade deals that have inflicted serious damage to Missouri industries.
Kunce offers a brand of progressive populism rooted in his personal story of economic hardship. “I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Jeff City,” he explains on his campaign website, referring to Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City. “Like so many Americans, my parents lived paycheck-to-paycheck—so when my little sister was born with a heart condition, the medical bills bankrupted us. Maxed-out credit cards and no money left, we struggled to get by.”
Like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Kunce is comfortable calling out corporations and economic injustice, recalling that, after his military service, “I joined the American Economic Liberties Project—the nation’s leading nonprofit in the fight against monopoly power in our economy and our democracy. We took on the corrupt politicians and monopolists who threaten our national security, dominate our lives, squeeze small businesses out of our markets, and enrich corporate elites at the expense of everyday Americans—from Big Tech and agribusiness conglomerates to pharmaceutical cartels and defense contractors.”
Hawley, who was educated at elite private schools, and then at Stanford and Yale, now tries to position himself as a rightwing populist willing to challenge some corporations. (He also famously greeted the January 6 insurrectionists with a raised fist in a show of support.) Meanwhile, Kunce cuts through the spin with a blistering assessment of corporate influence on politics and society.
“Our politicians have spent decades bending over backwards to give a free lunch to Wall Street, Ag monopolists, Pharma, and Big Oil,” Kunce posted on X. “So what’s the difference between corporate elites and hungry Missouri kids? Kids don’t write campaign checks.”
That message might even unsettle some Democratic insiders in Washington. But, if they want to hold on to the Senate, they’ll need to recognize that Kunce, and candidates like him, are essential to the party’s prospects in 2024—and to the renewal of American democracy in 2025.
A Fight We Can't Neglect
With the December 1, 2023, expulsion of New York Republican George Santos from the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as the resignations of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, on December 31, 2023, and Representative Bill Johnson, Republican of Ohio, on January 21, the GOP majority in the House fell to 219-213.
As The Hill noted, this means that “Republicans will be able to afford to lose only two votes on any party-line measure, assuming full attendance.” Special elections will fill seats, and the numbers will fluctuate slightly, but the narrowing of the Republican majority has significance when it comes to governing. It is even more noteworthy when considering the election this fall, when control of the House will be up for grabs.
Democrats must win only a handful of seats to take control of the House, where 218 seats are required to form a majority. Redistricting decisions by the courts have generally—though not entirely—benefited Democrats, especially in New York, where redrawn maps could make it possible to flip as many as six Republican-held seats in November. That alone would be enough to shift control of the House to Democrats.
Redistricting rulings in several other states have also boosted Democratic prospects, including one in Alabama where federal judges determined that Republican legislators had diluted the political power of Black voters. To remedy the situation, the state must now draw new maps featuring an additional district where Black voters comprise a substantial portion of the electorate. That could lead to the election of two Black Democrats from the state for the first time in history.
Ongoing litigation in Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, and Wisconsin could yield additional seats for Democrats—offsetting a setback for the party’s prospects in North Carolina.
In addition to fairer maps, Democrats are also likely to benefit from perception problems associated with Republican struggles to achieve anything with their legislative majority—a fact illustrated by the chaotic transition of power first to McCarthy, and then to the current House Speaker, Mike Johnson, an ardent social conservative whose extreme positions on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights are likely to hurt Republicans running in swing districts.
So Democrats are well-positioned to retake control of the House this fall, after losing it in 2022. That’s important no matter who wins the presidency. If President Joe Biden prevails, he’ll have a House that is less inclined to try to impeach him and more inclined to approve his legislative agenda. If Donald Trump wins and the Senate flips to Republicans, the House could become an essential barrier to rightwing hegemony.
In an election year when so much attention will be focused on the presidential race and the fight for control of the Senate, it’s essential to remember that, as U.S. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, says, the fight for control of the House is one that Democrats and progressives “can’t afford to neglect.”