Bless His Heart: Missouri Democrat Debuts Southern Accent After Launching Senate Bid

There’s a consultant-driven playbook for candidates: Ditch the khakis for jeans, roll up your sleeves, and start talking like your constituents. Missouri Democrat Lucas Kunce may have gone a little too far in his recent announcement of a Senate run.

Kunce has spoken softly Southern accent since launching his campaign Jan. 6. Kunce’s accent was evident in his campaign launch video. One scene features Kunce sitting quietly on a porch while Sen. Josh Hawley (R. Mo.) rips him. His video launch video is available here. “banker daddy.”

This campaign ad was followed-up by appearances on MSNBC. Kunce sat in front his collection of vintage. Trading cards for Magic: The GatheringHe said: “Missourians don’t tolerate cowards and frauds.” Kunce’s unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate will be familiar to those who have heard him speak. Different He was a left-wing staffer at the American Economic Liberties Project, just two years ago.

Political leaders are not the first to adopt Southern accents to make themselves more human. Hillary Clinton, a failed presidential candidate regularly varied her dialect to appeal to different audiences, earning her scorn from even liberal late night host Jon Stewart. Former president Barack Obama has a habit of sounding more like a Southern Baptist preacher than a Hawaii native when speaking in the South, and busted it out as recently as last fall on the campaign trail for Sen. Raphael Warnock (D.) in Georgia. As the Washington Free Beacon covered in 2018, Democratic House candidate Roger Dean Huffstetler transformed from a tech bro to a good ol’ boy just a few months after relocating to a rural Virginia district.

McGill University linguistics professor Charles Boberg, who co-authored the Atlas of North American English, widely considered the pivotal text on accents and dialects in the United States, said he was able to “detect variation” in how Kunce spoke before and after his campaign launch. Boberg speculated that Kunce could be cycling through a “repertoire” of accents that he uses to appeal to different audiences.

“I do detect some variation between more- and less-Southern-sounding pronunciation,” Boberg said after reviewing audio clips of Kunce. “It’s possible that the speaker sounds more Southern in general with certain audiences or in certain contexts than others. That’s fairly normal for people whose ‘repertoire’ of accents and speech styles includes both their version of ‘standard’ English and