Barbara Phifer
American politician
Barbara Phifer is an American politician and former United Methodist pastor who was a Democratic member of the Missouri House of Representatives from 2021 to 2025, representing the 90th district. She was the Democratic candidate in the 2024 Missouri Secretary of State election.
Early life and education
Born in Washington, D.C., Phifer is a graduate of Cornell College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and history in 1977. She then attended St. Paul School of Theology at Oklahoma City University, where she received a master's degree in theology in 1980.
Career
Phfier has served as a United Methodist pastor for over 40 years. Her preaching career included a five-year stint in Montevideo, Uruguay under a dictatorship, an experience which she said gave her "an understanding of the dangers of authoritarianism, which is what I see in the [Republican] party right now". Along with her criticism of Donald Trump, Phifer ran on a platform of expanding Medicaid, improving public education, and supporting gun control and social justice issues such as women's and LGBTQ rights.
Phifer had not thought about entering politics until after retiring from preaching, but decided to run for the seat vacated by Deb Lavender who was running for state Senate. In 2020, Phifer defeated her Republican opponent in the general election for Missouri's 90th state House district.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q107731048. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 2025, 2024 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara Phifer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.