Joan VonDras is worried that Missouri Democrats could make a Graham Platner-sized mistake. The retired schoolteacher, who’s running in August’s Democratic primary for the chance to take on U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Ballwin), understands that Fred Wellman has more money and more high-profile endorsements. But Wellman also has filed for bankruptcy twice—and has tax liens he’s still paying off.
“Ann Wagner is going to use all of this, and it could cost us the race,” she says.
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A retired schoolteacher, VonDras has built her campaign around the idea that we can make politics—and by extension America—less toxic if we just talk to each other. She’s hosted numerous “Town Talks” pitched as “saving democracy, one conversation at a time,” with the aim of finding common ground and promoting civil discourse. She’s also hosted a dozen open house-style discussions where she encourages people who are curious to learn more about her campaign, or just vent about the state of America, to stop by. A recent one at a coffeehouse in Twin Oaks generated sincere exchanges about getting corporate money out of politics, Medicare for all, and ranked choice voting.
But even when your campaign is built on the high road, you can’t always stay on it. VonDras says she started out supporting Wellman, but she couldn’t help but notice that her husband, who owns an architectural firm, was turned off by Wellman’s financial struggles and his explanations of them. “As a small business owner, he just thought, two bankruptcies—the idea that that made you a better executive? He was a little concerned.”
Ultimately, VonDras says of her husband, “He said, ‘If you don’t run, we will lose. And I had had a lot of people ask me to run, so at that point, I felt that same way.” She took $260,000 she’d made selling their Clayton home (they’re now living in Wildwood) and loaned it her campaign to kickstart a campaign for Congress.
And now, with Maine Democrats having belatedly pushed their nominee for U.S. Senate, Platner, out of the race after he faced a credible accusation of sexual assault, VonDras hopes everyone takes a closer look at the background of Wellman, a U.S. Army veteran widely considered the front runner in Missouri’s upcoming 2nd district primary. Political parties, she says, owe voters “thorough candidate vetting” before asking for their support.
Chelsea Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for Wellman, snapped back at the idea that Wellman is anything like Platner. “To compare owing money and working to pay it back with a credible allegation of sexual violence is vile and beneath anyone seeking the Democratic nomination,” she says. “Fred Wellman is a 22-year Army veteran who served his country through four combat tours, lived with the lasting wounds of that service, lost his business during the pandemic, and has been open with voters about what it took to rebuild. Fred is not running because his life has been perfect. He is running because he knows what it means to take responsibility, keep serving, and fight for people who have been knocked down and are trying to get back up.”
She adds, “The VonDras campaign is flailing, and instead of making an argument for their own candidate they have drug this primary into the gutter, desecrating the name of a man who has stood up for this country and for his community time and time again. This is the kind of dirty politics voters are exhausted by.”
Both Wellman and VonDras have based their campaigns on the idea that they can turn out voters who otherwise wouldn’t vote Democrat: Wellman with his military background, national connections, and sharp attacks on Trump; VonDras with an ability to find common ground with independents and Republicans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest online brouhaha VonDras’ campaign has faced is that she defended a Republican who’d posted an online testimonial for her campaign—but, as it turns out, had a history of toxic commentary on X. VonDras posted, and then took down, a video attempting to explain herself that was perceived as an attack on the Democratic activists who’d brought the volunteer’s X commentary to wider attention.
“They said he’s my campaign manager, which just isn’t true,” VonDras says. But she defends the video she later deleted: “It really is not an attack piece. It talks more about the incentivized industrial outrage complex on social media. That is the problem with social media—the toxicity of it and the damage it’s doing to our connection is incredible.”
At Rosemary Coffee Shop in Twin Oaks, VonDras comes across as warm and wonkish, with a stylish orange sundress and a beatific quality. “It’s a joyful campaign,” she remarks at one point, smiling broadly. You’d never guess she rides a motorcycle (something she took up, she says, after she beat cancer twice) but you could definitely see her teaching gifted students or leading college kids in discussion as an adjunct, jobs she juggled even while raising two kids.
On the phone a week later, she says she tends not to sweat the small stuff. “Some people are like a can of Coke, and I’m more like a bottle of water,” she says. “I stay very calm about things, very focused, and water flows and finds a way.”
She adds, “I have faith that the people of District 2 want to be heard, and they want to have a representative that listens to them and puts in structures that allows for that, and people are pretty excited about that.”
If there’s something that does get her ruffled, it’s what she perceives as the unfairness of some of the endorsements that Wellman has sewn up—including union endorsements.
“They just started stacking up for Fred, but I’m the union person, and also a lot of the endorsements in the party are people who’d never been to one of my coffees or a town hall, or even had a one on one with me,” she says. “I just would think that before you endorse somebody, that you might take an opportunity to get to know the other people in the race.”
Wellman’s spokeswoman, Rodriguez, is unsympathetic. “Fred has built a broad coalition of stakeholders by doing the hard work,” she says. “Fred reached out. He showed up. He listened. He told them who he was. None of Fred’s efforts to secure labor endorsements impeded Ms. VonDras’ ability to do the same work.”
Two candidates who had ambitions of taking on Wagner have dropped out of the Democratic primary (one, Nick Vivio, endorsed VonDras). VonDras has no plans to help Wellman consolidate the race before August. She’s full of slightly offbeat plans: a “thrift store crawl” with prospective voters and supporters in Washington, Missouri, a meet-and-greet at a Dungeons and Dragons bar in Ballwin. She previously did an event at what she describes as “an independent yarn store.” She’ll go wherever the voters are.
Sitting with supporters and potential voters in Twin Oaks, she listens as a man in a Packers jersey, Jerry Goerger, complains about how everyone is becoming radicalized. “It used to be Democrat or Republican,” he says. “I don’t think it’s that way anymore. You’re MAGA, or you’re radical left.”
VonDras patiently explains that she believes those voters represent no more than 15 percent on either side. “We have to focus on that 70 percent in between,” she says. “This is how we win in August.”
She’s already thinking about how she’d handle constituent services differently than Wagner, who is famously allergic to meeting with voters in a town hall setting. “I would want this to continue,” she says of her coffee shop open house-style meetings. “I think it’s really important.”
