State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman on Friday became the first major candidate to launch a campaign to replace Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, a fellow Missouri Republican who announced his retirement the prior day.
Coleman made national news in 2022 a few months before the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade when she introduced a bill to prohibit Missouri women from receiving an abortion out of state, a proposal the local Planned Parenthood called "the most extraordinary provision we have ever seen." But Coleman, who won a promotion from the state House to the state Senate later that year, doesn't live in the 3rd District. Rather, her home is in the neighboring 8th, and about three-quarters of her constituency overlaps with that district.
And Coleman is likely to have intra-party competition before long. Fellow state Sen. Nick Schroer tells St. Louis Public Radio Jason Rosenbaum that he's interested but first wants to discuss the race with another potential candidate, former state Sen. Bob Onder, whom he called a "mentor."
Onder, who took second to Luetkemeyer in the 2008 primary for the now-defunct 9th District, didn't rule out dropping his fledgling bid for lieutenant governor to run for Congress instead when Rosenbaum asked him on Friday. Rosenbaum notes that both would-be candidates also don't reside in the district they might seek but instead in the 2nd, which is almost entirely surrounded by the 3rd. (Members of Congress do not need to live in the district they represent, but most do.)
Former Senate President Dave Schatz, meanwhile, informed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Jack Suntrup that he's thinking about the race, too. Schatz ran for the U.S. Senate last cycle, but he took all of 1% in the primary. (And no, that's not a typo.) The Missouri Independent's Rudi Keller also mentions state Sens. Mike Bernskoetter, Travis Fitzwater, and Bill Eigel as possibilities; Rosenbaum, though, says that Eigel, who is running for governor, previously told him he'd never run for Congress.
Suntrup also speculates that disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens, who took third in the 2022 Senate primary, could jump in, noting that Greitens' team didn't respond when asked about the possibility. State Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden, however, says he'll continue his campaign for secretary of state rather than switch races, while Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe and Attorney General Andrew Bailey are also noes.
This post has been updated to note that members of Congress are not obligated to live in the districts they represent.
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