Ex-Miss Indiana hopes to unseat incumbent in 9th
Brian Francisco | Washington editor
FORT WAYNE – Shelli Yoder felt right at home at her first Democratic Party state convention.
Yoder, the party’s candidate for Congress in southern Indiana’s 9th District, is a graduate of IPFW. While in Fort Wayne, the Bloomington resident drove by a house where she lived while working on her bachelor’s degree in interpersonal and public communications.
“What a great education I got from IPFW,” Yoder said Saturday in an interview at Grand Wayne Center, site of the convention. “I have such fond memories of living here. It’s such a great city.”
During her undergraduate years, the Shipshewana native worked at what was then the Hudson’s department store in Glenbrook Square.
“A lot of people from this area have recognized her,” said Katie Carlson, Yoder’s campaign manager. “They were excited to see her.”
Yoder, 43, is used to turning heads. She was Miss Indiana in 1992 and placed third in that year’s Miss America pageant.
“I wasn’t attracted to the pageantry. I was attracted to the Miss America program because it talks about the importance of being a well-rounded, well-informed citizen,” she said.
She later earned a master’s degree in counseling from Indiana University South Bend and a master’s in divinity from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. Yoder has been associate director of professional development at IU’s Kelley School of Business in Bloomington, but she left the job to campaign for Congress.
The mother of three faces first-term Republican Rep. Todd Young of Bloomington in the Nov. 6 general election. While her parents are Republicans, “my dad always talked about voting for the individual,” Yoder said.
She said she is a proponent for improving roads, bridges, railways and broadband communications in the 9th District, and she supports President Obama’s health care law.
Click here to read the original Journal Gazette article and additional coverage of the Indiana Democratic Party State Convention, held in Ft. Wayne, June 15-16.
