Democratic Senate candidate Lucas Kunce of Missouri was roasted for using a “new Southern accent” to pander to voters in a video contrasting his normal talking style with the homespun drawl he used when campaigning.
Kunce — who’s running to unseat Republican Sen. Josh Hawley — was lampooned by Philip Letsou, the deputy communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“Experts agree: @LucasKunceMO has a new Southern accent for his campaign,” Letsou tweeted on Thursday. “Even a top linguistics professor — who literally wrote the book on US dialects — said Kunce is trying out a new accent.”
The video spotlighted the differences between the drawl the Democrat used when pandering for votes and his normal parlance, which is a standard American accent.
In an unintentional self-own, one of the taglines Kunce used in the video was, “Missourians don’t tolerate cowards and frauds.”
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Bless his heart.
Experts agree: @LucasKunceMO has a new Southern accent for his campaign. Even a top linguistics professor—who literally wrote the book on US dialects—said Kunce is trying out a new accent.
Take a look for yourself: pic.twitter.com/sFK84S0Cr8
— Philip Letsou (@philipletsou) February 2, 2023
Linguistics expert Charles Boberg, a professor at McGill University and author of the “Atlas of North American English,” examined audio clips of Kunce speaking.
Would you vote for someone who uses a phony accent?
“I do detect some variation between more- and less-Southern-sounding pronunciation,” Boberg told The Washington Free Beacon on Thursday. “It’s possible that the speaker sounds more Southern in general with certain audiences or in certain contexts than others.”
Boberg said it’s unlikely that Kunce’s intermittent drawl occurred naturally from the region where he grew up, which was Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri.
The professor said it’s common for people to change their talking style “in response to the needs of a particular situation.”
“Lots of middle-class African-Americans, for instance, speak both ‘standard’-sounding and African-American-sounding English and can switch and shift between these accents in response to the needs of a particular situation,” Boberg told the Free Beacon.
A furious Kunce clapped back on Twitter, accusing Hawley of trying to distract from real issues by focusing on his sham accent.
While the Democrat insisted the media attention on his phony drawl doesn’t faze him, his angry tweetstorm suggested otherwise.
To quote playwright William Shakespeare, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Interestingly, he did not deny that he was using a phony accent, claiming only that he was being attacked for “being a man from Central Missouri… who sounds like a man from Central Missouri.”
Josh Hawley now has the national Republican Party attacking me for being a man from Central Missouri… who sounds like a man from Central Missouri.
This guy is obsessed. It’s unreal. https://t.co/n0X8ZnOft1
— Lucas Kunce (@LucasKunceMO) February 2, 2023
This is getting embarrassing. It’s like Joshua doesn’t even know what a man from Missouri sounds like. https://t.co/sv1raaPYPf pic.twitter.com/7zal5D8JmI
— Lucas Kunce (@LucasKunceMO) February 2, 2023
Kunce joins a long list of Democrats who have adopted phony accents when pandering for votes.
Two-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been lampooned for resorting to “ebonics” when speaking to black voters.
The most memorable example was her “I don’t feel no ways tired” remarks during a 2007 campaign speech in Alabama.
This is a lame ploy Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York also has embraced when speaking to a black audience.
Ocasio-Cortez speaks in an accent that she never uses while telling a room of predominately black people that there is nothing wrong with them folding clothes, cooking, and driving other people around on a bus for a living. pic.twitter.com/FIbIAPokt0
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 5, 2019
Similarly, former President Barack Obama appeared to impersonate a black preacher in the Deep South while campaigning for Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia in December.
The issue isn’t whether Ocasio-Cortez or Lucas Kunce has an authentic accent; it’s the condescending phoniness in their approach to voters that’s troubling.
What most Americans care about is feeding their families, educating their children, being safe in their communities and enjoying their lives in peace.
The fact that many Democrats focus on superficial trivialities and not on things that matter to voters tells you all you need to know about their warped priorities.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.