Phelps, Plummer running for District 54 house seat

Published 11:25 pm Thursday, October 15, 2026

Republican incumbent Brandon Phelps and Democrat Taigan Plummer will appear on the Nov. 3 ballot for the Missouri House District 54 seat.

Phelps, a local landscape company owner, is running for a second two-year term in office. Plummer is a local real estate broker and owner.

District 54 includes Warrensburg, Centerview and Holden, along with rural areas of northern Johnson County.

Phelps said he is running with the same objectives he campaigned for in 2024. He defeated Joe Plemons with 83% of the vote in the August primary.

“I’m running for a second term for the same reason that I ran for a first term,” Phelps said. “When you run for these positions, you’ve got to have a passion for it. You’ve got to believe that you can make a difference. Even if that seems a little bit naive, you’ve got to do it because you have a passion for it and you believe that you can make some sort of positive change. Maybe big change, maybe little change. If you have that passion, and if you have that belief, then you keep going and you trust the will of the people.”

Plummer credited her upbringing of civic engagement and helping others in her decision to run for office. She ran unopposed in the August primary.

“[Growing up] we would help local nonprofits,” Plummer said. “We’d help the food center, stuff like that. Civic engagement was important. In my adulthood, I ended up by accident working with Warrensburg Main Street. I think everything just kind of went downhill from there because I found a love for nonprofit work. Basically, work I don’t get paid for and just doing the things that help the community most … I looked at this, and I’m like, ‘a lot of these organizations are struggling from state-level issues, or even federal issues in some cases. I didn’t see anyone fighting for that.”

Phelps’ principles

If elected to a second term, Phelps plans to continue pushing bills that did not see through the legislative process during the 2026 session.

He mentioned HB 2072, which would modify the offense of fourth-degree assault against vulnerable victims; HB 2074, which would create the Missouri Disabled Veterans’ Dependents Tuition Waiver to provide college tuition waivers for the children, stepchildren, and spouses of certain veterans; and HB 3112, which would create provisions relating to the conceal-carry rights of retired law enforcement officers.

Phelps’ campaign website indicates economic development, law enforcement support, reducing government waste, supporting family farms and businesses and depoliticization in schools as goals.

Phelps said there is also work needed to reduce the cost of living through areas controllable by the state legislature.

“Obviously we need to look at a way to get the cost of living down,” Phelps said. “Some of those things are going to be out of our control at the state level, with fuel. That’s going to be a hard thing to do. But some living expenses we can try to work on. I’m really looking forward to looking at getting insurance premiums down. We’re actually working with insurance companies. One of the leading contributors to the premiums that you and I pay is insurance fraud. If the legislature can work in tandem with law enforcement and with these insurance companies to reduce some of the insurance fraud, it makes a direct correlation to reducing our premiums.”

Working with a shrinking state budget through at least the next two years is also on his radar.

“We’ve got to figure out how to watch as that budget shrinks,” Phelps said. “We have to be able to increase funding for probably the two biggest priorities statewide, at least for me. We have to increase funding for public education and for public safety. Doing that, with the same amount of dollars year over year, or even slightly reduced dollars year over year. But to increase public education and public safety funding means we will have to cut some budgets in some other places so that we can get it to those students and students, and get it to law enforcement.”

Plummer’s platform

Plummer’s decision to run for office comes from personal experiences, voting for the approved earned paid sick leave measure in 2024.

The legislature went on to repeal the measure through HB 567 in 2025.

“In 2021, I had become paralyzed from the waist down,” Plummer said. “I had to learn how to walk again. I’d lost 90% of my hand function. I had no sick leave, even though I’d been working there for four months and I was working 60 hours a week. I had nothing to fall back on, even though I worked my rear end off for a company I was working for at the time … [The legislature overturning] was kind of the final straw. If our votes don’t mean anything, then what are we even doing? Their job is to represent us, not to tell us what we need, but to represent us in what we need to say.”

Plummer said she is running on the policy of education for the future, care for every family and prosperity for the future.

She said the policies would ensure school districts are fully funded and that rural healthcare is accessible and sustainable without causing strain. The platform also includes hopes for creating a subsidized childcare plan, with other hopes to put tax dollars back into the pockets of the people and small businesses rather than large corporations.

Plummer also mentioned a need to create state legislation against subsidizing data centers.

“Data centers are becoming a crisis across the nation, not because data centers are inherently bad but because of the way they are building them right now is terrible for the environments, terrible for the communities … they’re not paying their fair share back into the community that they are profiting off of,” Plummer said.

She also mentioned the need to legislate state guidelines for data collection such as Flock cameras.

“We’re seeing a struggle between the right to privacy versus how much privacy do you have in public space and how much data should be accessible to the government,” Plummer said. “That’s something we’re going to have to address in the next legislative session, no matter who is in office.”

Election details

To learn more about Phelps, visit voteforphelps.com/.

To learn more about Plummer, visit taiganfordistrict54.com/.

Voters eligible for absentee mail-in ballots have until Oct. 21 to request ballots.

Applications can be found at bit.ly/mo-absentee-request

In-person absentee voting runs from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday through Nov. 2 at the Johnson County Clerk’s Office inside the Reese Educational Center, 301 W. Market Street. The office will also be open from 8:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 31.

Joe Andrews can be reached at 660-747-8123.