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Stevens, Richards fight for Democrat nomination in Columbia

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The two women running in the Democratic primary to replace Rep. Stephen Webber in Columbia’s 46th District may both have a “D” next to their names, but Martha Stevens and Cathy Richards have little else in common.

Stevens is a young progressive with a decade of experience in advocacy in Missouri and elsewhere. Richards is a moderate who currently works as Boone County’s public administrator. Stevens has organized at a grassroots level while Richards has managed nearly 150 employees and worked for public administrators at the statewide level. Stevens, at 32 years old, is almost half Richards’ age. Stevens, an Army brat born in Germany, has lived all over the country, and Richards has lived in Boone County for her entire life. 

Stevens has the neutral All-American accent. Richards has that familiar slight, rural Missouri drawl.

While other Democratic primaries around the state might attract more attention, the 46th District race perhaps best displays the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party: the insurgent progressive arm that wants to expand government services against the stalwart moderates who still believe in the tenets of fiscal conservatism.

So far, that fight appears to be one that Stevens is winning – and there’s little love lost between the two.


Stevens announced her campaign in March of 2015 just after a major rally to expand Medicaid at the Capitol. Webber, a term-limited Democrat, endorsed her campaign shortly thereafter, and since then, Stevens has raised well over $35,000 as of the April 2016 quarterly reports filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission (over five times as much money as Richards, who has over $6,000 according to that report and has raised $2,000 more since then), a substantial sum for what many consider a relatively safe Democratic seat (Webber has won two elections there by roughly a two to one margin).* She credits that support with people in the 46th District and the rest of Columbia responding well to the values and beliefs she would like to turn into policy. Stevens is a strong advocate of Medicaid expansion, increasing funding for K-12 and higher education, worker’s rights and reproductive rights.

(From left to right) Martha Stevens with Rep. Kip Kendrick, Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and Rep. Stephen Webber
(From left to right) Martha Stevens with Rep. Kip Kendrick, Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and Rep. Stephen Webber

“When I’m knocking on doors, that’s what people are engaged in and talking about,” Stevens says. “Folks in the district want someone who’s going to be a strong advocate for health care, for reproductive rights, for defending the university.”

After graduating from the University of Missouri in 2006, she worked as a case manager for senior and disability services with the state, before leaving for Washington after her husband, a college sweetheart, got an engineering job in Seattle. She worked for a nonprofit that benefitted low-income seniors. When the recession hit, he was laid off and the two moved back to Columbia to be closer to family. She went back to school to get her Master’s in social work, working with the Boone County Council on Aging (which later merged with Services for Independent Living). After graduating, she worked under lobbyist Michelle Trupiano for Planned Parenthood.

Stevens went on to work for the Missouri Medicaid Coalition and the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, working and organizing with people from around the state, especially Mid-Missouri, to inform them of their health care options. She recently stepped away to campaign full time, but expanding health opportunities for those who do not have it is still at the forefront of her mind. It drove Stevens to run in the first place.

“I’ve worked with a lot of low income folks that have bad health outcomes typically early in life that turn into long term chronic diseases, and there’s a lot of opportunity through public policy to try to address some of those things,” she says. “Even though I know I’ll be in the superminority. I think my past ten years as an advocate and a social worker gives me a unique set of eyes and experience to be a good advocate.”

Richards has a much different story than Stevens. She was born in Northern Boone County near Rucker and went to elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse with her seven brothers and sisters. After graduating from high school, she started a family and moved to Columbia. Her kids went to Rock Bridge High School and she worked on her own higher education, getting degrees from Columbia College, William Woods University and Stephens College.

While she initially desired to become a nurse, Richards found that she succeeded better at a management level after working with a group of veterans at the VA hospital. After working on the bureaucratic side of health care, she ran to become Boone County’s public administrator, which works with the estates of the deceased, disabled and minors when there is no legal guardian or conservator for those estates. Richards says she got into the business to help the vulnerable.

“It’s a really intense position,” she says. “You can ask any other elected official, it’s probably the hardest position there is in county government.”

Cathy Richards files to run for office Feb. 23, 2016. (Courtesy cathyrichards.org)
Cathy Richards files to run for office Feb. 23, 2016. (Courtesy cathyrichards.org)

Richards handles the estates of hundreds of clients incapable of handling them themselves under her office’s purview. She personally oversees 134 of those cases.

She then got involved with the Missouri Association of Public Administrators (MAPA) and eventually became the organization’s president in 2014. She oversaw a revamp of the arm of the group that advocated for policy changes at the state level, hiring a lobbyist and an attorney. Richards also pushed a bill sponsored by Rep. Kevin Engler that would raise the MO HealthNet asset limit for the disabled – all while fulfilling her job as public administrator.

“I’m surprised I have any hair left,” she said of the stress.

But that position also got her involved in policy making, both witnessing the process and working with those across the aisle. Richards decided she wanted to become a representative that MAPA and other county officials could turn to make laws work for them.

“I realized I can’t get any further in my office if we don’t change statute,” she says. “So instead of going to them and asking, I can be that person that they come to and I can tell all the others. I know that area really well.”


The two paths that set Stevens and Richards against each other served more as a collision course than concurrent streams where one becomes the tributary and the other one, the river. Richards came into the race later than Stevens after questioning her time in the district. In conversations with friends, Richards said Stevens was a question mark in Columbia political circles when she announced her candidacy about 14 months ago.

“I kept waiting to see if someone would run against her because this is my district. She doesn’t know anything about my district,” Richards says. “Why would she run not knowing anything about it?”

Eventually, she decided that that someone she saw as inexperienced with life in the district was going to run, she would take matters into her own hands.

“I’m going to do what democracy says to do, which is… give them another choice,” Richards says.

Richards said that her decision may have angered some within Democratic leadership, namely because Webber had endorsed her so early in the cycle. To Richards, it seemed as if the party had conspired to put Stevens into office on the whim of one representative, despite what Richards saw as a lack of experience – something the public administrator wants to make a focal point in the campaign. In the video on her website and in her literature, Richards emphasizes her two decades living in the 46th.

“She hasn’t lived in Missouri very long,” Richards said. “I’ve been on committees, I’ve been with the city managers, all the kinds of jobs that I’ve had, I’ve been involved in my town. She doesn’t understand any of that. She’s just coming in here as an activist.”

However, Stevens defended her time in the district, having lived in Columbia since 2002 aside from that stint in Seattle, and her work as a policy-minded person.

“I was not recruited by Stephen Webber,” Stevens said. “I was running for a month before he endorsed me. I earned his endorsement. I was not a hand-selected candidate.”

Excepting the possibility of a secret Democratic program creating ideal candidates for elected office, Stevens has not been manufactured in a laboratory to run for office. However, she fulfills most of the requirements the Missouri Democratic Party wants, especially from its candidates in safer districts. She’s younger, an advocate and activist knowledgeable about the issues, and holds strongly liberal policy positions. Pro-labor, pro-choice, and perhaps most importantly, pro-Medicaid expansion – all positions she shares with the man she intends to replace. Webber himself is seen as a progressive, and her list of endorsements features a fair share of other left-wing Missouri representatives.

“Martha has a strong background in public policy and she will be a good representative of the district,” Webber said.

That last position, one that most Democratic legislators have harped on since the Affordable Care Act rolled out, is one that Richards does not hold. She cites fiscal responsibility as a primary reason she remains leery of Medicaid expansion.

“What if we can’t pay for it as a state?” she says. “I just want to make sure whatever I make a decision for now that 20 years from now, it’s not going to kill those kids coming into college or whatever they’re paying for to make a life for themselves.”

That alone may put Richards at odds with Democratic leadership, along with the fact that she has kept mum on her stances on certain social issues, arguing that there were no perfect yes or no answers to some of the more complex, but pressing, problems facing society.

The two agree on a few things. Both want to expand funding for education, and both support the University of Missouri, even through the hardships it has endured in the past year and maybe even because of them.

But aside from that, Democratic primary voters in the 46th District have a distinct choice with two candidates that somehow operate within the same party.

Updated – 12:36 p.m. May 30: The previous amount of money reported raised by Richards was an incorrect figure. The new figures are accurate. Clarifications were also made to Richards’ role as public administrator.