AN UPHILL RACE TO SAVE DEMOCRACY: Democrats could lose control of the Senate in 2024, making House races crucial.

• Date: 01 February 2024
• Author: Nichols, John

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 out-raised 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...