Democrats fight for attention in crowded Missouri Senate primary in St. Louis County

Four Democrats are running to succeed state Sen. Brian Williams in North St. Louis County — and struggling to get anyone to notice.

Democrats are pushing hard to get voters to the polls to vote against two constitutional amendments, while TV and social media ads are ramping up in the St. Louis-based 1st Congressional District rematch between incumbent Wesley Bell and former Congresswoman Cori Bush. 

And perhaps the biggest draw in the district is the race for county executive, where Williams himself is a candidate. 

“It’s gonna be tough for the people who don’t have name ID,” said Terry Wilson, a Jennings councilman and longtime organizer in North St. Louis County politics. “People are going to get drowned out by all of that.”

Whoever emerges from the Aug. 4 primary will be the odds-on favorite in November in the heavily Democratic Senate District 14 against Republican Vernon Norman. 

Wilson, who has not endorsed anyone in the crowded Democratic primary, said the candidate who likely carries the most name recognition in the district is John Bowman, a longtime Northwoods resident who is president of the St. Louis County NAACP, a political consultant and a former state representative.

Close behind, Wilson said, is outgoing state Rep. Raychel Proudie of Ferguson, who has several viral moments on social media from her impassioned speeches during House debate.

Joe Palm of University City has been a leader in state and federal public health agencies and has been active in the Democratic Party behind the scenes for decades. 

Shante Duncan of University City may not have the name ID, Wilson said, but her nonprofit has led empowerment programs for women and girls throughout the district, as well as operated a women’s shelter. And while never a candidate herself, she runs a political and communications consulting business. 

“I think everybody has a unique story,” Wilson said. “It’s a good field of candidates to choose from because they all bring some type of experience to the table, which is what we need.”

John Bowman

In the last few years particularly, the NAACP’s fight against voter ID and redistricting legislation has landed Bowman on TV news and radio shows.

His organizing roots in the Senate district were born out of being a longtime union member.

He’s lived in North St. Louis County for more than 40 years, and most of them were spent working as an electrician in the automation area at the Chrysler plant. 

As a member of the United Auto Workers and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Bowman said, “I saw firsthand how powerful organized labor can be in lifting working families like mine and creating opportunities for advancement.”

His union involvement pushed him towards politics, first as a Northwoods alderman and later as a state representative for North County from 2004 to 2008. 

In the House, he served on the budget committee and pushed for infrastructure funding. He’s also proud of a bill he passed to require high-school students to take a course in financial literacy. 

Probably his biggest challenge in this election is how he left office.

In 2008, Bowman pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor involving a bank scheme, where he said he fell “prey to a predator,” pointing to the banker in the case.

“And as Black Legislative Caucus chairman, I thought I was helping out a young man, who was African American, fulfill his position,” he said. “Turns out this guy was doing some bad stuff.”

While Bowman argues he wasn’t involved in the scheme, he wasn’t willing to put his children’s college savings up for a legal defense against the charge, he said. Bowman resigned from office, but was given a “second chance” by becoming chief of staff for former Sen. Robin Wright-Jones and later leading the NAACP. 

As NAACP president, he’s been behind fights most don’t see, including getting grocery stores in the district’s food deserts and equity in economic development.

“It’s an obligation for people like me,” Bowman said, “who have the experience and knowledge of how to get things done to stand in the gap.” 

Shante Duncan

As a young journalist living in North St. Louis, Duncan placed an advertisement in The St. Louis American newspaper’s community section for people to join her sister circle called S.H.E.R.A.H., Sisters Helping Each Other Reach Higher Heights. 

The group was a way to build community, while learning yoga, meditation, jewelry-making and most of all how to support each other. 

“Then it took on a life of its own,” Duncan said. 

Their numbers grew, as did the needs, which led Duncan to later open the Joan B. Quinn Safe House in 2018 to provide housing for women healing from sexual and domestic violence, including sex trafficking.

At the same time, she was a student at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, where she wrote a program called the LOVE Project that she piloted at St. Vincent’s Home for Children. Eventually, various schools were asking for the program, and her team was working with 500 students a week. 

“We’ve been all over, and the intention is to create that same safe space for these young girls, teaching them about self love,” she said.

To date, she said her team has provided safe spaces for more than 6,000 women and girls of color through the LOVE Project, community healing circles and retreats. 

As other organizations turned to her for advice, Duncan formed SMD Consulting in 2011 to provide development and consulting services to organizations and businesses.

That also led her to become a campaign strategist and then regional field director for the Democratic Party in 2024, tapped by Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Russ Carnahan. 

Now her goal is to marry her skills: create real pathways for young women to become elected leaders in the community. That begins with figuring out how to do it herself. 

Duncan said through her role in the Democratic Party, she has worked with the outgoing Sens. Williams and Karla May of St. Louis, along with numerous others in the legislature.

“I do have experience, not as an elected official, but as someone moving in communities,” she said, “and I have these relationships that I can leverage to help ensure that I am ready for the fight ahead.”

Joe Palm

Joe Palm began his public service as a firefighter in St. Louis, and he believes it’s informed the way he’s handled most of the positions in his career. 

“As a firefighter, you have to go in when people are running out,” he said. “We can’t leave, when the fire is still going. No matter what barriers you run into, you keep your focus on getting the job done, and that’s a different type of mindset.” 

Over the past two decades, Palm built a career in public service, including serving as the chief of the Office of Minority Health for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. There, he led critical programs addressing the opioid crisis, violent crime, and health disparities — including the statewide rollout of COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites. 

In 2022, then-President Joe Biden appointed Palm as regional director for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he eventually oversaw public health operations across 15 states and territories, including Missouri, New York, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Palm was the committeeman in a ward just on the city border of the Senate district he lives in now. He attended Berkeley Middle School and graduated from Ritenour High School, so he’s known the district all his life. 

“I have great experience on a local, state, and federal level at a time such as this where that knowledge can be helpful for the communities across this district,” Palm said. 

Palm believes most of the candidates want the same things for the district.

“I just think that I’ve been on the ground,” he said. “I’ve had to work in the field administrating and doing it.”

Raychel Proudie

After growing up in Ferguson, Proudie earned a degree in elementary education from Grambling State University in Louisiana. She graduated in 2006, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and accepted a position teaching third graders in Baton Rouge, where many of her students had fled New Orleans.

Her students had witnessed incredible horrors of the hurricane, she said, and their parents were struggling to find work and housing.

“Those children were still expected to perform on those tests,” Proudie said. “There wasn’t a deep appreciation, like it is now… for the trauma that those children experienced, which led to some of the behaviors.”

That experience led her to earn a master’s degree in mental health counseling. She moved back to Ferguson in 2016 to raise her nephew when her brother was incarcerated, and she eventually found a place at Riverview Gardens School District as a counselor. 

She used her degree and experience in Baton Rouge to work with students who lived in Canfield Green neighborhood, where Michael Brown Jr. was shot and killed in 2014 by a police officer. 

Proudie became more involved in the school board and eventually was urged to run for state representative in 2018.

The legislature is a very different place than when she came in, she said, and it’s going to take a senator who’s willing to “do something new” to make a difference. 

“In my race, there are some of the most talented, kindest people you’d ever want to meet,” she said. “But just being a nice guy, we would already have it, and we don’t. I’ve grown a reputation of being very shrewd, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t bring nothing home.”

Proudie said every year she vows to put something on the governor’s desk, and this year her bill making it clear that pregnancy cannot prevent a divorce from being finalized was the first one Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed.

Among other legislation she touts is laws, both passed last year, to have the state financially aid local governments with testing for toxic nuclear waste and the CROWN Act to ban race-based hair discrimination in public education.

As the only legislator from St. Louis County on the House Budget Committee, she said she’s pushed for millions for infrastructure projects.

“We have to go about this another way, because that same old, same old, is how we found ourselves in this position in the first place,” she said. “So right now, we need different and we need stamina.”