Democrat Debuts Southern Accent After Launching Campaign, Then Video Exposes His Real Voice

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.

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“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…

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