For a candidate trying hard to brand himself as a blue collar everyman, Josh Hawley is spending a lot of money on private air travel.
Since Hawley was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2018, his campaign has spent a little north of $155,000 of campaign funds on chartered flights, including as much as $23,669 in a single payment, according to data filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
The Hawley campaign did not respond to a request seeking comment yesterday.
Hawley is currently in the final stretch of his first Senate re-election bid, where he faces Marine veteran Lucas Kunce. In the months leading up to the November election, Hawley has sought to neutralize Kunce’s populist message and chip away at his strong support from organized labor by pivoting to an economic populism of his own. In October, he changed a long-held position on “right to work” legislation, adopting a pro-union stance. He showed up to support both striking auto workers in Wentzville last September and picketing Teamsters in Hazelwood in March. (The Teamsters donated $5,000 to Hawley’s campaign the following month.)
Missouri Independent columnist Jeff Smith, a Democrat, acknowledged Hawley’s political dexterity in pivoting away from his image as a fist-bumping insurrectionist to a candidate focused on “economic and cultural populism.”
But around the same time of this pivot, Hawley’s campaign’s expenditures on private air travel increased. Of the $155,000 total he’s spent on flying private since taking office, about $130,000 has come since December.
The busiest flying time captured in the FEC filings came during a six-week stretch in February and March, when his campaign spent just over $87,000. “I’d be curious to know what all the folks he’s met on the picket line would think of this,” Smith says.
As for Hawley’s opponent, Kunce senior adviser Connor Lounsbury tells SLM, “Lucas has never flown on a private or charter flight. Unless you count flights chartered for overseas deployments by the Marine Corps.”
Hawley’s practice of flying private dates back to when he was state attorney general. Before winning the Senate election in November 2018, Hawley’s campaign spent more than $10,000 on private air travel and accepted a chartered flight from a lobbyist, even as he blasted then-incumbent Senator Clarie McCaskill (D-Missouri) for her use of chartered flights. Hawley’s campaign went so far as to label his opponent as “Air Claire” and cut a campaign ad with footage that showed McCaskill boarding planes as the narrator scolded, “Air Claire thinks Missouri is just flyover country.”
At the time, Hawley said McCaskill’s use of private air travel on what she called an “RV tour” meant she was “out of touch” and “phony.”
“He and his allies went so far as to create Twitter accounts and an entire website devoted to hammering Claire for the very thing he is now doing—and spending more money on than she did,” says Smith.
Yet Hawley, who maintains his residence in Virginia, has not exclusively flown private this campaign season. In August, a Twitter user posted a photo of the senator outside the Starbucks at St. Louis Lambert International Airport’s Terminal Two. Unless he was about to catch Lufthansa to Germany, he was probably there to hop on a Southwest flight.
“Seeing Josh Hawley at the airport is wild work,” wrote @temithefeminist, who posted the photo. “I didn’t even know he came to this state.”
