Exclusive: Lucas Kunce on the Supreme Court, Abortion and Josh Hawley

Missouri’s Democratic Senate candidate, Lucas Kunce, wants to help voters in his state “take back power” from politicians like GOP Senator Josh Hawley.
Former President Donald Trump won Missouri by more than 15 points in 2020, and the state’s governor, attorney general and both senators are Republicans. Hawley has raised more than $22 million for his reelection campaign, whereas Kunce has raked in just half that amount.
But the Marine veteran says that Missourians are ready for change, describing Hawley as a “typical country club” politician and suggesting he’s disconnected from voters’ needs.
“We are really trying to take power back from politicians like Josh Hawley, who want to control us and take our power away,” Kunce told Newsweek. “He wants to control us in the bedroom, the doctor’s office, the workplace. He was a right-to-work guy, anti-union. He won’t protect IVF or contraception.”
As a retired Marine, Kunce also expressed concern that Missouri doesn’t have any veterans serving in Congress. “One of the failings that we have here in Missouri is that not a single member of Congress from Missouri is a veteran, not any of them,” he said.
While polls show Hawley with a significant advantage, Kunce’s team says this will evaporate as the campaign moves forward. In a somewhat positive sign, Emerson College polling carried out in January and then again in July suggests Kunce may be making inroads. The January data showed him trailing Hawley by 12 percent, but in the latest Emerson poll the margin decreased to 9 points.
Abortion will also be on the Missouri ballot in November, with a proposed constitutional amendment to protect women’s rights to have an abortion. Similar measures in states across the country have passed since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Democrats have repeatedly appeared to get a boost of support in elections since that controversial decision.
“The abortion petition, it’ll be a huge driver to get out to vote people who want to take that power back,” Kunce said.
Newsweek spoke with Kunce in an exclusive Zoom interview on Monday, discussing a wide range of issues, including the Supreme Court, abortion rights and why he thinks it’s time for Hawley to lose. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Newsweek: Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you decided to throw your hat in the ring for this Senate seat?
Kunce: I’m just kind of your normal mid-Missouri kid. I was born and raised here. My family’s been here for generations. I grew up in a beautiful working-class neighborhood. When my little sister was born, she had to be immediately airlifted hours away to St. Louis, to the hospital for open-heart surgery.
When you’re kind of living paycheck to paycheck in this country and any medical disaster hits like that, it’s really hard on your family. My parents went bankrupt, and I remember them really struggling hard, not just because they didn’t know if my little sister was going to survive, because they didn’t know how they were going to take care of the rest of us.
And so kind of when they were at the very lowest point is when I saw just the strength we have in our communities here in Missouri, because the people in our neighborhood who had no more money than we did—this is a working-class neighborhood—they passed the plate down at my mom’s prayer group for us. They brought more food by the house than we could eat. They took me and my other siblings into their homes for weeks at a time, while my parents were hours away from my sister’s hospitalizations. I’ve spent my entire life trying to pay that back.
Some of the guys who used to help me out were Marines. One of them in particular would take me down to the Marine Corps league in Jeff City, and I would listen to these guys talk. They always did everything they could to take care of their community, and they did it without looking for any glory or any accolades. They just did it because, I thought, it was the right thing to do, and those guys were my heroes. I always wanted to be like them, so I joined the Marine Corps when I wrapped up with school.
I got to go to college because people in town gave me scholarships, and I got a Pell Grant, and I just thought the best way to pay everybody back would be to become a Marine. I served for 13 years. I deployed to Iraq. I led a police training team there, so 12 Marines and a Navy corpsman up and down the roads of Fallujah. My job was to bring everybody home safe, which, thank God, we did.
I deployed to Afghanistan twice. And you know, what really started to burn me up during this time is that I had signed up for a reason, to serve and protect the community that had taken care of me. And while our country lit $6.4 trillion on fire, supposedly nation-building Iraq and Afghanistan, my old neighborhood just completely fell apart—mostly because country club politicians waged war on the working people who lived there.
The first house I lived in is an empty lot. The one that everybody brought the food by and took care of us in is boarded up to keep the squatters out. The store on the corner where my little sister and I would walk by ourselves to go buy candy, it was shut down for a while because it got robbed so many times it couldn’t get insurance anymore.
I just came to realize that the best way that I could serve my community after all those years in the Marine Corps was to get into the U.S. Senate, do it the right way and actually represent them and bring money back to our state and invest in us.
So that’s what we’re doing. In my campaign, I take no money from corporate PACs, no money from federal lobbyists, no money from Big Pharma executives. I didn’t want to take money from these people who are the ones buying off our politicians so that they could strip our communities for parts. We built a real grassroots movement. We’re really proud of what we’ve done.
I know one of the big issues, which will actually be on the ballot, is reproductive rights. I know you’re supportive of bringing back Roe v. Wade as the standard. How do you think this ballot measure will impact your campaign?
What Missourians have been trying to do here for the last several years is take back power for themselves. Some of the ballot initiatives that we passed—we are really trying to take power back from politicians like Josh Hawley, who want to control us and take our power away. He wants to control us in the bedroom, the doctor’s office, the workplace. He was a right-to-work guy, anti-union. He won’t protect IVF or contraception. He supported overturning Roe. He even wants to get rid of no fault divorces, which would trap so many people in dangerous marriages.
What Missourians have been doing is they’ve been rejecting that type of politics, and we’ve been taking power back at the ballot box. You mentioned the abortion petition—it’ll be a huge driver to get out to vote people who want to take that power back. Just over the last several years, we overturned that right-to-work legislation Josh Hawley supported. We overturned that, 68 to 32, at the ballot. We increased the minimum wage $5 over the federal level at the ballot. We expanded Medicaid at the ballot. We made it legal to recreationally smoke weed
That’s what they’re going to do on this ballot initiative. And then that’s what they’re going to do with my campaign. We’re going to basically be the top of the ticket in this state, my Senate race and that abortion petition. I’m really excited to be really leading the charge for Missourians on taking power back from these guys so that we can just live our own lives.
There are a lot of Democrats calling for ending the filibuster in the Senate so that they could potentially pass legislation to shore up reproductive rights or some of these other issues. Is that something that you support?
I don’t like the idea of saying that we should get rid of the filibuster for one particular bill or another. I think we should get rid of it altogether. The reason I say that is just the money in politics angle and the way that these massive corporations have bought off our politicians.
You know, I want to abolish corporate PACs. I want to end Citizens United [the Supreme Court decision]. I want to get Big Oil and Big Pharma out of politics. The filibuster is a tool for these people with money to buy off fewer senators in order to pass legislation, right? When the threshold is 60, then that means that’s that many fewer senators that they have to buy off in order to keep a status quo in a system that is broken for all of us but works for them.
I say we need to get rid of the filibuster just for democracy, right? It’s a rule that was just made up. We should go with the majority and see where it takes us, and we definitely need to do that, because it’s twisted—the way that we let money influence politics and the way that the filibuster is used as a tool for these guys to just keep power for themselves and take it away from all the rest of us.
Another issue I think you’ve raised concerns about in the past is the Supreme Court. What are your thoughts on President Biden’s new reform plan for the court? Is it something that you support?
I haven’t gone deep on that plan. What I will say is that the judiciary is corrupt. It’s very clearly corrupt. They’ve turned themselves into a legislative body. When you look at the Supreme Court, there are no ethics rules whatsoever.
One thing that makes me mad is when I was at the Pentagon I used to go watch all these hearings in Congress, where members of Congress would be overseeing the exact same companies that they own a bunch of stock in. It’s crazy that members of Congress can make decisions based on their stock portfolios rather than the rest of us.
An analogue to that: There are all these federal judges that are making decisions based on big companies—banks, credit card companies. And they have massive investments in these companies. They have personal reasons for making decisions, not based on the law but based on their stock portfolios. I think what you’ve seen is a judiciary that used to be respected in this country turn into a corrupt set of people who are just out there to make money for themselves or they have political agendas.
I don’t think that they should be able to own stocks and several other things. So I think we need real ethical rules on the judiciary, just like we had as Marines. When I was a Marine, I was eventually stationed at the Pentagon doing procurement. Everybody who does procurement in the Marine Corps has to get rid of any stocks that they have that would be impacted by that. I didn’t own any stocks, so it didn’t impact me, but everybody who got sent there did. And, you know, these guys are Marines who didn’t choose to go there. They were ordered there, and their lives still had to change based on that.
I think the least we can ask members of Congress and the federal judiciary is just to do the bare minimum that a Marine would do in that situation.
Of course, you’re quite critical of Senator Hawley. But he does have a record of winning in Missouri, as do a lot of Republicans in recent elections. What do you think it is about Hawley and Republicans that resonates with voters?
Josh Hawley doesn’t resonate with voters. He won with just 51 percent of the vote in 2018 when he had the support of our former Republican senator, Jack Danforth, a very respected person. He was Jack Danforth’s golden boy. Jack Danforth raised all the money for him, and Josh Hawley was your typical country club Republican back then. He still only won with 51 percent of the vote.
Since then, Jack Danforth has said that helping Josh Hawley get elected, that supporting Josh Hawley, was the worst mistake he’s ever made. Josh Hawley has never had to run for election as the man that he is right now. He’s never had to run as the guy who thinks that in vitro fertilization and contraception or abortion are murder. He’s never had to run after taking away rights of everyday Missourians. He’s never had to run after being exposed for supporting no-fault divorces and thinking people should be trapped in marriages.
This is not the guy who’s run for election before. Missourians are going to hold him accountable. They’re showing that over and over again.
JD Vance has been criticizing Kamala Harris’ running mate, Governor Tim Walz, over his military service. What is your perspective on that as a veteran?
I actually haven’t paid attention to that particularly. I’m really focused on the race here in Missouri, how we’re going to win. Getting out and meeting every single voter that I can. Over the past several weeks, we’ve done town halls, open town halls, where anyone can come and ask questions—everywhere from Dexter to Palmyra, Joplin, Dade County, St. Joseph, Columbia, St. Louis and Kansas City. My focus is on that meeting everybody and making sure that we win this one and take power back.
But when you talk about veterans, that’s another reason that we are going to win this race. Josh Hawley has never had to run as a guy who stalled the [Honoring Our PACT Act of 2022], which was made [for] people like me, who were, as I was, exposed to burn pits in Iraq. A lot of people have cancer from that, and the PACT Act was created so that we could get medical care that we deserve and earned in our time over there. Josh Hawley played politics with that act. He voted against it at first. He only finally caved when the pressure became so real that he couldn’t take it anymore.
I can tell you right now, one of the failings that we have here in Missouri is that not a single member of Congress from Missouri is a veteran, not any of them—not any of the members of the House, not either of the senators. It shows we don’t have the sort of advocacy that we should have. I use the VA for my health care. Thousands and thousands of people in the state understand what that’s like.
I know you’ve raised concerns about monopolies and the need to improve unionization. If you’re elected to the Senate, what specifically would you do to address those concerns?
I want to fundamentally change who has power in this in this country right now. The people with power are the people with the most money and these massive monopolist corporations, many of which are multinational and don’t care about America at all. I want everyday people to have power again. I think the number one way we have power is by having the right to organize.
Now, Josh Hawley didn’t want us to have the right to organize. He supported the right-to work legislation that was against unions. I support the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and that’s one of the first things that I’ll co-sponsor and hopefully vote to pass when I’m in the U.S. Senate. When we pass that legislation at the federal level, we’re never going to have to worry about right-to-work in this state again.
When I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, a union job was your ticket to stay in the middle class. Everybody in my neighborhood was on the edge of the middle class, and if you got a good union job, that’s how you knew you were going to stay there. I want everybody to be able to live that dream. I want to invest in American manufacturing. I want to put Missouri first in building out the next generation of manufacturing and American energy.
You’re a Marine. I’m sure you’re very familiar with guns. Are you currently a gun owner? And what do you think the country should be doing about gun violence?
I am currently a gun owner. I respect my weapon, and I’m proud to have it. I’m glad that I have it. I carried multiple weapons with me for many, many months in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I feel very comfortable with that.
I think one of the wildest things to me is that, you know, 80 to 90 percent of Americans, and the vast majority of Missourians, just want a few simple protections on the transfer of weapons so that they don’t go to crazy people or folks with a criminal mindset, right? We don’t want these weapons to go to criminals or terrorists. What we want is real criminal, terrorist, violent history background checks on all gun sales. What we want is real red flag protection, so that if you’re in a bad mental state you can’t buy a weapon and have it immediately.
I would say that for youth, it’s absolutely crazy that we would just let youth have a weapon and a bunch of ammo, particularly an assault weapon, without any sort of training or understanding of the weapon system or anything like that. As a Marine, he would never do that. I mean, who arms kids more than the United States Marine Corps? I guess maybe the Army, right?
This is our business, and when these kids get recruited, we don’t just give them a weapon and ammunition right away, right? We bring them in, we teach them, teach them weapons safety. We teach them how to disassemble and put back together their weapon. We teach them to respect it. We teach them how to shoot and really take care of them.
I want to talk a bit about foreign policy. One of the big issues right now, a lot of progressive Democrats have been upset with the Biden administration’s response to the war in Gaza. What is your perspective on this issue? And how do you think the U.S. should be responding?
I think what happened on October 7 was an absolute abomination and a tragedy, and I think that Israel had a right to defend itself. As they’ve continued on that path, we’ve seen the way that they’ve chosen to defend themselves. As a guy who was in Iraq and Afghanistan, just bombing everything is not going to work. A lot of civilians are dying, and it seems to me that they’re dying unnecessarily.
I really, really want to use my position as a U.S. senator to work us towards a negotiated ceasefire that includes getting the hostages back. I think we got to get in there, and we got to make that happen. You don’t win a war by killing a bunch of civilians.
I believe you used to do negotiations with the Russians and with NATO. Based on that experience, how do you feel the U.S. should be responding to the situation in Ukraine? Do you think we should continue to fund the Ukrainians?
I was stationed at the Pentagon. I worked for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I was the military’s lead arms control negotiator with the Russians and NATO overseas in Europe, leading up to this conflict. This is after Russia had already invaded Ukraine, and they’d already invaded Crimea and the Donbas. I think it’s just cartoonish for these guys to pretend like Russia isn’t a real threat. They have started large-scale warfare in Europe, something we haven’t seen in quite a while.
The worst thing we could do is end up in a situation where we ultimately have boots on the ground there. It’s very costly for the American taxpayer, and it can lead to widespread escalation. What we’re doing right now in Ukraine is a prophylactic. The investment we’re making there is preventing that war from spreading and keeping us from having a full, blowout, NATO-involved wild war.
I think the money we’re putting there is absolutely critical. I would also say that money stays in the United States, right? When Josh Hawley voted against funding Ukraine, $600 million of that was going to machinist plants right here in Missouri. He got out there and said, “This is just money for Ukraine. It’s no money for America, and it’s definitely no money for Missouri.” Well, that’s not true. It was $600 million of money for Missouri in these two plants.
Manufacturing is the only thing keeping some of these towns up. And I think that it’s really disingenuous to pretend, like, Putin is not a bad guy and not a threat because he is. I’ve sat across the table from the Russians during negotiations. They’re deceitful. They’re all about power, and they want to take as much land as they can grab.
And I also think his reasoning for not wanting to put money in, and saying that money won’t go to Missouri, is also a fabrication. It’s just it’s really disappointing to see the amount that he’s willing to be dishonest or disingenuous on this.
In June, you published an op-ed warning that the “Biden Saudi alliance puts America in danger.” Can you explain that concern?
Absolutely. The Saudis are one of the worst regimes in the entire world, and for some reason every president thinks they need to be pals with the Saudis. It’s absolutely disgusting. They gouge us at the gas pump. They lead a multinational cartel of oil production that hurts us—takes away our power. It makes us look small and weak.
The Biden administration’s plan here is to give security guarantees to the Saudis, which mean we would have to protect them, and it’s to give them permission and then help them develop nuclear power. You know, begin the path towards what could ultimately be a nuclear weapon. That’s absolutely crazy.
They’re using the same, I guess you’d say, logic, that decades ago America used when they gave Iran a nuclear power plant, taught them how to use it and gave and put them on the path towards a nuclear weapon. Now, we’re dealing with the fallout of that, right? Once you get the capacity to do that, you’re going to want to have nuclear weapons.
We shouldn’t help the Saudis get a nuclear weapon. They only care about power and money for themselves. They don’t care about us, and it’s absolutely ridiculous for us to give them any security guarantees.
Related to the Saudis and OPEC, what should the U.S. be doing to address energy concerns moving forward?
When I was an arms control negotiator and I went overseas leading up to the conflict in Ukraine, we had a lot of intelligence that showed Russian buildup, modernization of their military and the threats they were becoming. I would go around and talk with our NATO allies, and I would say, “You guys got to take hard positions on Russia. We need you to be more aggressive. They’re violating all their treaty obligations. We need you to call them out more.”
A lot of them didn’t want to do that because they were getting cheap natural gas from Russia. They were essentially funding Putin’s war machine, which now you’re seeing in operation. And the worst part about it all is that while they were funding that war machine, they were admitting that what Putin was doing was scary.
You know what their solution was for it? It wasn’t for them to stop buying the gas from Putin. No, it was for the United States to send over more troops and equipment. And every president did it. Every president sent over more troops and equipment to protect them from the threat that they were funding.
When I look at back at that, it’s like, well, remember that 6.4 trillion we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan and a war for, in Iraq at least, a war for oil. What if we had spent that money investing in the next generation of energy so that we would own the next generation of energy, whether it’s nuclear, hydrogen, solar, wind—whatever it happens to be? But we didn’t, and now we got another war in Europe, and we’re continuing to send troops and equipment over in a war that’s essentially based in energy money.
So my biggest concern here is that now those same NATO allies have realized that they made a big mistake buying that Russian gas, and they’re looking for the next generation of energy. And they’re not looking to the United States. They’re looking to China because China has made the investments in the next generation of energy and we haven’t. So my biggest fear here is that we’re going to end up trading in a multinational cartel led by the Venezuelans, the Saudis and the Russians for a monopoly led by China on the next generation of energy.
We can’t have that. We need to be in control of the next generation of energy, American energy. I have a Marshall Plan for the Midwest that would put Missouri first in building out that next generation of energy and manufacturing. It would make sure that we do cutting-edge research and development in all assets of new energy. When I was at the Pentagon, we were looking at different types of energy. It’s out there. We can explore it.
It doesn’t have to just be wind and solar, right? Everybody’s like, “Oh, it has to be this uber-granola stuff.” I think that’s great, and I think we should use it as we can. But, there is also hydrogen, there’s also nuclear. There are many options that we can look at here, but we’re not, and that’s because Big Oil owns our politics. And when you talk about Big Oil owning our politics, just look at how these guys behave. The former CEO of Exxon said, “I’m not an American company, and I don’t do what’s in the best interest of America.” He literally said it.
The problem is that we have these people who don’t do what’s in the best interest of America in charge of our politics. We’re not making investments in the next thing, and China is going to control the next generation of energy if we don’t step up and make a difference.
Did you have any final thoughts you wanted to share before you get back to your day?
I’m the only guy in this race who’s going to fundamentally change who has power in this country. We have a path to do that. We just have to win. If you feel like you’re tired of controlling politicians like Josh Hawley taking away your rights, I’m the guy who’s going to get them back for you.