KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City resident Floyd Pentlin walked into Clay County Democratic Headquarters Saturday for a meet and greet with Trudy Busch Valentine, one of the top contenders for the Missouri Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.
He left still undecided.
“What I want is a Democrat. What I want is the one who has the best chance of winning the election,” Pentlin told The Star. “At this point I don’t know what that is.”
The Democratic race for Senate has turned into an intense, bitter battle during the final days before the Aug. 2 vote.
It’s an unusual situation for Missouri Democrats, who haven’t experienced a highly competitive Senate primary in decades. Every Democratic nominee for Senate since at least 1998 has won the primary with at least 66% of the vote.
Busch Valentine, a philanthropist and beer family heiress from the St. Louis area, has captured the support of much of the state’s Democratic establishment, including Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City among others.
Lucas Kunce, a former Marine from Independence, is campaigning as a hard-charging populist. Both candidates are savaging the other as they fight for the chance to take on the Republican nominee in the fall.
But more than one in five very likely Democratic primary voters remain undecided about who they’ll support, according to a poll conducted July 21-23 by Emerson College and The Hill that found 22% haven’t made up their minds. Busch Valentine leads at 39%, with Kunce at 35%. A third candidate, St. Louis real estate broker Spencer Toder, has just 3% support.
The margin is close enough that undecided voters may ultimately determine the winner. In the final days of campaigning, they’re coming under a barrage of negative messaging from the candidates aimed at turning them away from the other.
Also looming in the minds of some voters is which Democrat has the best chance in November. Democrats face a steep climb, but the possibility that Republicans will nominate scandal-plagued former Gov. Eric Greitens has raised the stakes in the choice facing Democrats. Greitens resigned in 2018 amid allegations of sexual assault and blackmail, and earlier this year his ex-wife accused him in an affidavit of physically and emotionally abusive behavior toward her and their two young sons.
“I haven’t made up my mind because everything that Lucas and Valentine says is great. I believe it all,” Pentlin said. “The trouble is which one is going to get enough people to vote for them from the other side.”
The current race has turned nasty – an unusual position for Missouri Democrats typically used to watching Republicans beating each other up in Senate primaries while Democrats coalesce around a favorite candidate.
Busch Valentine is running an ad that says Kunce opposed gay marriage and wanted more jail time for marijuana offenses when he last ran for office, a failed congressional campaign in 2006. Kunce, who has said he supports LGBTQ rights and the legalization of marijuana, through an attorney has called the ad defamatory and demanded it be taken down. An attorney representing Busch Valentine’s campaign responded by saying the ad is factual.
For his part, Kunce is attacking Busch Valentine’s wealth and her past attendance of the Veiled Prophet debutante ball in St. Louis, which is hosted by an organization that had a long history of excluding minorities. Busch Valentine has apologized for her participation.
“I don’t think you’re gonna find any competitive race of any size that doesn’t get negative and snarky at the end,” said Stephen Webber, a former chair of the Missouri Democratic Party who said he isn’t publicly supporting a candidate but will help whoever wins the primary.
“As a Democrat…obviously, I don’t like to see it. I want the winner to be in the best shape to compete in November, but it’s something that was always going to happen and it’s to be expected.”
The two candidates are fairly evenly matched, Webber said, with roughly comparable amounts of money in their campaigns. Each also has strengths and weaknesses that make for a more competitive Senate primary than Democrats have seen in recent decades.
Busch Valentine’s wealth vs. Kunce’s small dollar donors
Kunce, who has been in the race since March 2021, has raised $4.6 million, driven by small dollar donations, including from out of state. The haul is significantly more than Busch Valentine, who didn’t announce her campaign for another year. She’s instead had to rely on her considerable personal wealth, loaning $5 million to her own campaign.
“Every week she writes her campaign a check for a million dollars.So she basically has unlimited fundraising. So that’s why she can buy all the TV ads,” Paul Zacharias, a Kunce supporter from Columbia, said at a rally for Kunce on Wednesday.
Neither candidate was publicly well-known before running. Kunce has been running since March 2021, shortly after Republican Sen. Roy Blunt announced he wouldn’t seek re-election. He grew up in Jefferson City before attending Yale and getting a law degree from the University of Missouri. He spent 13 years in the military with the Marine Corps.
Busch Valentine launched her campaign in March 2022. She had previously supported Democratic candidates financially, in addition to philanthropic efforts. She’s the daughter of August Busch Jr., who built the Anheuser-Busch brewing empire. She grew up on Grant’s Farm and later became a nurse.
“Typically for a race of this magnitude, it’s relatively rare that major contenders for it are starting the cycle unfamiliar to the electorate,” said Jeff Smith, a former state senator. “There’s no baseline level of familiarity for either of the major contenders.”
Whoever wins will have to quickly build statewide support and recognition ahead of the general election. This will be an especially important task if Greitens wins, causing independents and some Republicans to look at other candidates.
“Trudy Busch Valentine offers as much contrast to Eric Greitens than anybody I can possibly think of,” said state Rep. Wes Rogers, a Kansas City Democrat supporting Busch Valentine.
“She’s just a good hardworking person, she’s not a politician, she clearly cares about people. So she’s just a natural contrast to Eric Greitens.”
State Rep. Rasheen Aldridge, a St. Louis Democrat who endorsed Kunce, questioned whether Busch Valentine would be able to mobilize voters in the general election.
“Is this the party of the establishment or is this a party of everyday people?” Aldridge said. “I’m fearful that we have one candidate that is not ready for what’s going to come in November.”
Despite the negative attacks on TV, during recent campaign stops in the Kansas City metro, Kunce and Busch Valentine spent more time promoting themselves than attacking each other. At a July 12 event at J. Rieger & Co. distillery, Kunce emphasized that he doesn’t campaign donations from corporate PACS, federal lobbyists and fossil fuel executives.
For Democrats to win in Missouri, Kunce said in Kansas City, “you’ve got to be different, you’ve got to go the extra mile, you’ve got to show people that you actually believe in something and that you’re willing to make a sacrifice, even on the campaign, so that they know when you’re in office that you’ll continue to sacrifice for them.”
At a rally in Columbia on Wednesday, Kunce made one of his final pitches of the primary campaign. He told an audience of about 50 that his grassroots populist campaign was about uniting the state and challenging the policies of “country club Republicans.”
Candidates make final pitch to voters
He compared his form of populism to the politics of President Harry Truman, who represented Missouri in the Senate for a decade. He touted his military record, criticized legislators for enacting Missouri’s ban on abortion and condemned private equity companies for buying up rural healthcare facilities.
“What populism really is —it’s about uniting everyday people to go against the system in mass with our combined power to break a system that’s not working for us,” he told the crowd.
At Clay County Democratic Headquarters on Saturday, Busch Valentine said she is willing to work with Republicans but also argued that she knows how to fight, too.
“I can be damn tough, too, if I need to be tough,” Busch Valentine said. “And I can be really tough against the Republican Party that is so not with how I feel or with how all you feel.”
She added that she “grew up in a family of men who were strong-willed” and that she can “handle being with men and I can handle whatever they throw at me.”
Even as the candidates dash across the state in the final days of the race trying to win support, it’s TV ads that will play a “huge deal” in moving voters off the fence, Webber said. The massive amount of ads and the influence of friends and neighbors are the two factors driving most people’s decisions, he said.
Missouri House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, said many people she’s spoken with are going back and forth over who to support.
The negativity of the race has been disappointing, Quade said, especially when Democrats are looking at the prospect of trying to defeat Republicans such as Greitens or Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt. Schmitt is currently leading in the polls and has built a statewide reputation through frequent lawsuits over pandemic precautions and vaccine mandates.
The race is also raising questions about what kind of party Missouri Democrats want.
“Should we be moderate? Should we be more progressive? Should we be more aggressive? Or should we try to find the middle? How do we win back rural voters? How do we excite the urban voters?” Quade said.
“Those are constant challenges that we’re dealing with right now as a party.”
