Sen. Josh Hawley is featured in some of the most notorious imagery of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. But his actions that day — including pumping his fist in solidarity with the protesters before some of them broke police barricades — haven’t come up much in the closing weeks of his reelection bid.
It’s a change from the start of the race when Democratic challenger Lucas Kunce used those images in his campaign launch and even announced his candidacy on the anniversary of the insurrection. Now, Kunce’s campaign is focused on making a broader case that Hawley doesn’t deliver for his constituents.
“He’s out there shaking his fist, and the second things got real, he’s skittering out the back door as fast as he can,” Kunce told NOTUS. “Most people, they got lots of reasons why they don’t like Josh Hawley, frankly, and [Jan. 6] is just one piece of the puzzle.”
Kunce called his early messaging around Jan. 6 a “good starting spot” for his campaign to unseat Hawley but that he doesn’t “want to rely on just one example” to make the case that Hawley is “a coward as a U.S. senator.”
Missouri doesn’t have an especially competitive Senate race. Former President Donald Trump won the state by 15.3 percentage points in 2020, and in 2018, Hawley unseated two-term Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill by a 5.8% margin. But the race captures some of the broader questions the Democratic Party is asking itself: How effective is Jan. 6 as a line of attack?
Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist, said it didn’t end up being the “silver bullet” Democrats hoped it would be, especially in Republican-leaning states.
“I think that’s the challenge for folks in my party who thought it was just going to be this thing, which I frankly never did, that, you know, was this going to motivate voters?” Schale said, adding that Democrats have to weigh the issue against other considerations in their races.
Hawley’s campaign declined an interview request and did not respond to written questions about how he thinks the insurrection has factored into his campaign. The senator has largely avoided the topic on the campaign trail, and it didn’t come up in the candidates’ only debate so far.
Kunce’s messaging about Hawley’s actions on Jan. 6 reflects a cautious approach to avoid alienating split-ticket Republicans and suggests a concern that invoking the insurrection distracts from local issues that resonate more with moderate voters.
Kunce said he’s not interested in adhering to Democratic Party rhetoric about democracy, saying his race is “not about some sort of overall national message.” The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Missouri Democratic Party did not respond to written questions about the effectiveness of attacks based on Hawley’s actions on Jan. 6.
Polls show Americans are weary about whether there will be a peaceful power transfer after the election — 84% of Democratic and Republican voters polled by Reuters/Ipsos in July said they were concerned about postelection political violence. So why aren’t Democrats using the insurrection to appeal to voters based on these fears more?
“A Democrat can’t win a red state just being a down-the-line partisan,” said Jeff Smith, a former Democratic Missouri state senator. He added Kunce’s newer messaging about Jan. 6 “probably appeals to a slightly broader swath of the electorate.”
Hawley was the first senator to announce that he would object to the certification of Joe Biden’s win. In February 2021, he said Trump’s second impeachment trial was “illegitimate” before calling Jan. 6 participants “criminals.”
He’s drawn criticism from Missouri’s largest newspaper and the state’s former Republican Sen. John Danforth, who called Hawley’s actions on Jan. 6 “intolerable” and said that supporting his 2018 bid for senate “was the biggest mistake” of his life.
In 2022, after the House committee investigating Jan. 6 released footage of Hawley running to safety, he tweeted a link to his WinRed storefront selling mugs with a photo of himself pumping his fist for protesters at the U.S. Capitol, and he told CNN he regretted nothing about his actions that day. In 2023, he made the case that some rioters who entered the Capitol were nonviolent and unaware they were breaking the law. But earlier this year, Hawley said Trump shouldn’t issue a blanket pardon for every rioter if he’s reelected.
Kunce said Hawley’s shifts show he’s “scrambling to try to sound more reasonable.”
Republicans aren’t worried about it.
Gregg Keller, a former adviser to Hawley during his 2018 Senate race, said he’s noticed Hawley is rarely asked about Jan. 6 by voters.
“[Kunce] and his team recognized that it is not a winning issue amongst Missouri voters writ large, and they quickly jettisoned all that talk,” Keller said, adding that in such a red state, “Kunce has to go to such pains to avoid angering Trump voters.”
National Republicans were similarly apathetic. When asked about the role Jan. 6 is playing in the Missouri Senate race, National Republican Senatorial Committee Communications Director Mike Berg instead pointed to other issues. “Josh Hawley is absolutely crushing Lucas Kunce,” Berg said.
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Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.