ST. LOUIS—With the Nov. 5 election day less than two months away, Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and his Democratic opponent, Lucas Kunce, have yet to agree to appear at the same debate.

The next scheduled opportunity is next Friday at the Missouri Press Association’s annual convention in Springfield.

All of the candidates in Missouri’s race for governor have agreed to a forum at the event, but as of Friday afternoon, Hawley and Libertarian W.C. Young have not confirmed their attendance at a Senate debate there.

Missouri Press Association Executive Director Mark Maassen told Spectrum News the event will go on without them, including empty podiums as they have at previous events.

In 2022, Eric Schmitt, the then attorney general and GOP nominee for the Senate, did not appear at the forum, featuring his opponents Democrat Trudy Busch Valentine and third-party candidates. The two major party candidates did not meet in a face-to-face general election debate.

In the current cycle, the state of debate is essentially frozen from where things stood Aug. 15, when the Governor’s Ham Breakfast at the Missouri State Fair briefly hosted a contentious meeting between the two candidates. Kunce had agreed to a televised debate later that day in Sedalia, while Hawley had agreed to a forum hosted by the Missouri Farm Bureau. Kunce declined that debate because the Farm Bureau had already endorsed Hawley’s campaign and said hosting it could potentially amount to an election law violation.

In the weeks since, both candidates have used the standoff to suggest on social media or in advertising that the other candidate is afraid to defend his record.

“We’ll absolutely make time for debates,” Hawley told Spectrum News on Thursday. “I’m ready to debate, I’m sure we’ll do it.” A spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question Friday about his participation in the Press Association event.

“I’m willing to do it, I’ve accepted every single one of that’s come out, he hasn’t accepted any of them,” Kunce told Spectrum News Thursday night in Festus.

On matters of policy, the two campaigns do appear to have found some common ground on the issue of in-vitro fertilization and former president Donald Trump’s announcement that he’d back federal government payments or insurance mandates to cover the procedure.

‘I think everyone should have the power to build their own family, have a family, I think that’s the American dream and I think we should support it with everybody,” Kunce said, adding that insurance companies have the means to afford it. “They’ve got the money. Instead of giving to shareholders, they need to give it to the people who pay the premiums and make it so we can build families the way that we deserve.”

“There are all kinds of things we can do for folks who are trying to start a family via IVF or by other means and whether that’s by providing them with a tax credit like the child tax credit or providing them access to deductions or health insurance mandates as the former president has floated–he hasn’t been clear about how he would do it exactly,” Hawley said.

Hawley joined all but two Republican members of the Senate who voted against a measure in June that among other things would have mandated coverage under public and private insurance plans.