Kim Reynolds is a good Iowan governor

I know a gal. Like me and many others, she’s a lifelong Iowan who never needed to look outside our happy little flyover state to make a life for herself.

My fellow Iowan worked as a motor vehicles clerk in her county treasurer’s office many years ago. After work, she would occasionally vent to her husband about how her office’s processes could be improved – so much, apparently, that when the county treasurer decided not to seek re-election, her husband encouraged her to run for the job.

She did. She won. The college dropout and married mother of three school-aged girls was elected to four terms.

You might have heard of her, too. Her name is Kim Reynolds and she’s the Governor of the State of Iowa.

Or as I call her: the Big Kim Energy.

She hadn’t envisioned a long career in electoral politics when she set out to run for Clarke County Treasurer in 1994. She got one anyway.

Nobody ever had better on-the-job training. Reynolds, whose energy and work ethic as a brand-new state senator earned the attention of former Gov. Terry Branstad, was selected in 2010 as Branstad’s running mate for his return to the governorship.

Branstad was clearly mentoring a capable Reynolds to be his successor. She ascended to the role on May 24, 2017 after Branstad left to become U.S. Ambassador to China.

Despite being led into the position, Reynolds has done the governorship her way.

She signed legislation prohibiting abortion in Iowa after a fetal heartbeat is detected, reducing the legal timeframe from 20 weeks’ gestation to around six.

Though the law was enjoined for several years, she stood by her position. After the Iowa Supreme Court found in 2022 that the Iowa Constitution does not guarantee a right to an abortion and the U.S. Supreme Court returned abortion policy to the states, Reynolds called a special session in 2023 to re-establish the limit in state law, which is no longer enjoined.

She signed multiple tax cuts into law, ensuring Iowa no longer has the highest corporate tax rate in the country. Under Reynolds, Iowa now has a flat 3.8% income tax rate and no longer taxes retirement income for seniors.

She learned relatively quickly from the mistakes in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools and whole industries were ordered shut down. Five years after COVID shutdowns sparked learning loss and depression from a lack of engagement, Reynolds can boast that Iowa reopened schools after months, not years, and that Iowa helped get its people back to work by eschewing prolonged incentives to stay home.

And when talk of a return to 2020-like COVID restrictions briefly emerged in other states amid rising case counts in September 2023, Reynolds’ response to a flood of inquiries from Iowans worried about new mask mandates and shutdowns made her position clear: “Not on my watch!”

She isn’t afraid to resist absurdities such as males playing in girls’ and women’s sports. Nor has she hesitated to stand firm against the ideological poison of gender identity that promotes dangerous puberty blockers for kids and non-medically necessary surgery on teenagers in the name of “gender affirming care” and encourages 12-year-olds to choose a new name and identify as a different gender that schools affirm while keeping it secret from their parents.

Her signature hits in 2021 include enhancing the ability for public charter schools to form and ensuring that no school district could stop a resident student (and the dollars they get from the state) from open-enrolling into a different district (and taking those state dollars with them.)

And when some legislators from her own party wouldn’t come to the table for her signature education plan, she took the ballsy step of finding new ones to replace them by endorsing a slew of Republican primary challengers in 2022.

That bold move paid off. In January 2023, with fortified Republican support, Reynolds signed the Students First Act into law, delivering on the promise that parents seeking the right educational fit for their kids should get an equal sliver of Iowa’s per-pupil education investment. All while her Democrat critics, numbering their smallest in years, continue to throw around their same distorted claims about education dollars.

Despite volunteering for Reynolds’ campaign prior to becoming a newspaper opinion writer, I don’t agree with every policy that she promotes. Just last week I wrote a column in which I gave her a hard time for siding with Big Energy companies by promoting a bill that would give them a monopoly on electricity transmission.

But no action of hers I oppose, however sharply, changes my belief that our state has been tremendously impacted by Reynolds’ leadership – and that the Big Kim Energy has made Iowa a better place.

If I had to pick one moment from her tenure during which we saw the best of Kim Reynolds’ personality, it wouldn’t be any of her bill signings or her nationally-seen response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech in 2022 or anything like that.

It would be a boring afternoon in April 2020, when Reynolds posted a few awkward photos she took of her husband, First Gentleman Kevin Reynolds as he mixed and applied drug store hair dye to her greying roots during the height of the COVID-19 shutdowns. While the Nancy Pelosis and other political elitists of the world were sneaking into salons that were closed to the lowly commoners, Reynolds was enduring the same restrictions she’d placed on her people – while poking a bit of fun at herself in true Midwest style.

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Reynolds knows that to be a good governor, she must be a good Iowan. Our good Iowan governor is a mainstay at the state fair. She’s there in jeans and sneakers handing out trophies at the state basketball tournament.

She knows who the premier college sports team is in our state and dons the cardinal and gold beautifully. She loves her husband, her family, her job and peanut M&Ms out of the freezer. (Another policy position I endorse.)

Our good Iowan governor announced Friday that she will not seek reelection in 2026. Regardless of who wins the next election, the Kim Reynolds era in Iowa government will come to an end in 21 months.

(Unless she decides to do a Branstad, which … hey, never say never!)

As for the Big Kim Energy? I have a feeling that will stay charged for many years to come.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com