‘I cannot let my daughter’s future be tarnished’: Viloria first District 4 challenger since 2010

HANNIBAL, Mo. — It’s a girl’s world this election season — even in Northeast Missouri.

“I have a 16-year-old daughter, and she’s my world. Her friends are my world — I love those girls,” said Melissa Jo Viloria, a Democratic candidate for the Missouri House of Representatives. “My main reason for running was because of them.”

Viloria is running for the Missouri House of Representatives in District 4 covering the counties of Shelby, Knox, Scotland, Lewis, Monroe, Schuyler, Clark and part of Adair, with Shelby being the newest county in the district following the 2022 redistricting.  

Viloria will face Republican incumbent Greg Sharpe in the general election on Nov. 5 — the first competitive race in the district since 2010. Sharpe has run unopposed in every general and primary election he’s run in since first running for office in 2018. Republican Craig Redmon held the seat prior and also ran unopposed in every general and primary election he ran in for the seat. State representatives are elected for two-year terms.

Viloria’s family returned to Missouri nine months after she was born in Honolulu, Hawaii “to a Filipino taxi driver and a Missouri farmer’s daughter,” as listed on her UpBallot.com profile. Her mother’s family has been in the state for three generations.

“The roots run deep,” she said.

Growing up as a biracial kid in Monroe City, it was difficult for Viloria to understand her identity. The small town feel kept her grounded, though, and she’s still friends with many of the same kids she went to kindergarten with.

Job growth, education and reproductive health serve as the pillars of Viloria’s campaign.

“What we need to concentrate on, especially when it comes to job growth in our area, we need to have young people understand that … you don’t have to go to bigger areas to find your place, because there is a great place for you here,” Viloria said.

By encouraging young people who don’t want to go to college to explore their options in trade, Viloria hopes to remind them they have a strong foundation to build upon in northeast Missouri.

Viloria describes herself as a “staunch supporter of public schools.” One of the things she hopes to achieve in regards to education is to increase teacher pay.

According to the National Education Association, Missouri is ranked 47th in the country for teacher pay, with an average salary of $53,999 for the 2022-2023 school year. For comparison, Illinois is ranked 12th in the country with an average salary of $72,315.

“Public schools are where our kids decide who they’re going to be in life,” she said.

While job growth and education are among her top priorities, one issue sits at the heart of her campaign: reproductive health, an issue that voters have the opportunity to clarify their stance on when they vote on Amendment 3 in November.

Missouri has some of the strictest abortion laws in the country, with a near-total ban on the procedure. Exceptions are made only in cases of “medical emergency.” The ambiguous language of “medical emergency,” combined with the states’ class B felony penalty for anyone who performs an abortion, results in near-death situations for pregnant women. There are no exceptions for rape and incest.

The rhetoric around reproductive health is not reality, Viloria said. She believes legislators should not be the ones writing laws around a topic they don’t understand and that they should seek the counsel of doctors and other experts.

“If you can’t go and do an operation, you shouldn’t be legislating an operation,” she said.

The Missouri Independent reported in June that, since the current reproductive healthcare laws went into effect in June 2022, the state has seen a 25 percent decrease in applicants for OB-GYN residencies due to concerns that state laws would prevent medical students from receiving fully comprehensive training in their specialty.

Viloria is the first woman to run for the seat in a general election since Democratic candidate Bridget Brown ran — and lost — in 1998 against Republican Rex Barnett. Viloria is picking up the pace, though — 25 years later.

“(Women) are 52 percent of the population. It’s time for us to show the representation,” Viloria said. “Smart, passionate and driven women are not a bad thing.

“We don’t need to sit in the back seat.”