By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Democrat Pam May of St. Joseph is taking on a big challenge in her first political campaign.
May is running against the senior member of the Missouri Congressional delegation: 6th District Republican Sam Graves.
May says she didn’t intend to take the leap, though she felt a woman needed to be represented on the ballot.
“I kept watching, hoping that another woman with more experience would file to run,” May tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post in an in-studio interview. “I just saw that was not going to be happening and so I just decided to run.”
May says she felt a woman needed to be represented on the ballot since Amendment Three is on the November ballot. May favors the amendment which would loosen abortion restrictions in Missouri.
May is retired. She worked most of her professional life as a legal secretary and para legal for Legal Aid of Western Missouri. May says she will not be running as a typical Democratic candidate.
“I’m not out there using standard, Democratic talking points,” May says. “I decided I wanted to not be out there being angry, calling people names. I wanted to run a different campaign.”
May says she hopes what she says during the campaign will resonate with residents of northern Missouri. May says she believes the district is ready for a change. Just traveling the 6th Congressional District can prove challenging. The district runs from the Missouri River to the Mississippi River, a mostly rural district, that covers the 39 counties making up the northern third of Missouri.
May says it will take more of the residents of the district to get engaged in politics for her to pull off the upset, relating what she heard from a speaker at a seminar who stated the biggest threat to democracy isn’t certain candidates or even the courts.
“The biggest threat to democracy, in his opinion, and I agree with this, is that people aren’t involved and people don’t vote. And that’s the biggest threat to our democracy,” May states. “And so, we have to get people engaged.”
Graves has represented the 6th Congressional District since 2001 and has the most seniority of anyone in the Missouri Congressional delegation.
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