Marine and Populist Policy Expert Shakes Up Field for Open Blunt Seat
Independence, MO – Former Marine Lucas Kunce launched his campaign today to represent the people of Missouri in the U.S. Senate in 2022. Kunce joins the race in the wake of Senator Blunt’s retirement announcement on Monday.
“Missourians are frustrated with Washington because there are so few Senators with life experiences similar to mine or people in the communities I grew up in,” said Kunce. “My parents worked hard and made it until my sister’s illness caused them to go bankrupt from medical bills. I didn’t just experience the struggles, though. I also experienced the way we took care of each other. When our family was down everyone– black and white, young and old–was there for us. And when they were down, we were there for them. That’s just how it was. I got to go to Yale on a Pell Grant and chose to dedicate my life after that to honoring what our community did for us. I joined the Marines, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and represented our country in arms control negotiations with NATO and Russia. After 13 years on active duty, I joined a non-profit fighting large corporations who use their monopoly power to stick it to the middle class. I’m running for the U.S. Senate because Missouri deserves new leadership that will stand up for working people and better-paying jobs.”
Kunce continued: “One of the hardest things for me during these deployments was coming back home to Jeff City and seeing what was going on in my old neighborhood. When I came back from Iraq in 2009, the first house I’d ever lived in was bulldozed down, and it’s now an empty lot. Now the house I lived in when I joined the Marine Corps was vacant and starting to fall apart and the corner store is boarded up. The whole time my buddies and I were risking our lives and our country was spending trillions of dollars trying to build up these other countries, towns like Habbaniyah, Fallujah, and Herat, we should have been spending our money, blood, and sweat on towns like St. Joe, St. Louis, and Jefferson City. Roy Blunt may be retiring but the interests that have waged war upon the middle class are stronger than ever in Washington. The same companies that Washington worked with to ship jobs and opportunity out of our state for decades are stronger than ever… while Missouri has had the worst economic recovery from the great recession in the area. The Marine Corps taught me to fight, to lead, and to organize. The fight is now here in Missouri.”
Kunce’s campaign will focus on revitalizing Missouri’s communities by creating better-paying jobs and fighting the outsized power of Wall Street and large corporate monopolies that have stolen Missouri’s wealth and weakened the middle class. “We have been building, creating, and repairing things in Missouri for generations, and we aren’t done yet,” Kunce said.
In Kunce’s 13 years in the Marine Corps, he was deployed as a Team Leader to Iraq, leading Marines on escort missions, convoys, and police combat training programs, and twice to Afghanistan as a Judge Advocate and South Asia Foreign Affairs Officer with Special Operations Task Forces. Following his deployments, Kunce — a Major —served as an International Negotiations Officer in the Pentagon, representing the United States in arms control negotiations with Russia and our allies. Since leaving active duty last fall, Kunce has served as the Director of National Security Policy at the American Economic Liberties Project, a non-profit fighting corporate monopoly power, as their Director of National Security. Kunce’s work has been published in the New York Times, The American Prospect, and The American Conservative, including pieces on the national security case for decarbonization, the threat Wall Street poses to National Security, and the impact of corporate monopolies on the military. Kunce, a father of two, lives in Independence, Missouri.
