A range of emotions could be heard in Gov. Kim Reynolds’ voice as she spoke to reporters at the annual Terrace Hill Easter Egg Hunt on April 12. It was the day after her surprise announcement that she wouldn’t run for reelection in 2026, and Reynolds was clearly feeling sentimental as she reflected on her time as governor.
“It’s been the honor of a lifetime to serve Iowans in this capacity,” she said at the beginning of the 10-minute Q&A. “You know, every day I felt the weight and the privilege of being able to do that, and I worked really hard to just give it 100 percent of my time.”
Reynolds repeated what she said in her April 11 announcement: The reason she’s not running is because she wants to spend more time with her family. It’s probably true. She’ll be 67 when her term ends. Her husband has been undergoing treatment for lung cancer, her grandchildren are getting older and so are her parents.
There were other factors in her decision — “You know, you make a list and pretty, pretty even, you think a bit longer,” the governor told the reporters at the egg hunt — but she didn’t say what they were. Still, it’s easy to identify some things that might be on such a list.
For example, polling suggests another run for governor wouldn’t go as well for her as 2018 and 2022 did. For five straight quarters, Reynolds has been the most unpopular governor in the country, according to Morning Consult’s quarterly tracking poll of approval ratings. The final poll in that losing streak — showing Reynolds as the only governor with an underwater approval rating — was published the day before the governor’s announcement. That’s too late to affect her decision, but Reynolds’ cratering approval rating was a story long before that last poll.
There’s also the Trump factor. No state is safe from the president’s erratic behavior, or that of his biggest campaign donor, whom Trump is letting slash federal funding and decimate federal agencies with his DOGE team. Iowa is particularly vulnerable, and not just because the agri-business-industrial complex that’s dominated the state for decades relies on money, guarantees and other services from the federal government. It’s also that Trump in his second term seems to relish indulging in petty acts of revenge, and he surely hasn’t forgotten Reynolds campaigning for Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Iowa Caucus.
Not running for reelection means Reynolds is only responsible for dealing with whatever damage Trump does for the next 20 months, and won’t have to contemplate what to do if Trump tries to run again or stay in office after his term ends.
But beyond the Trump factor, there’s the Reynolds factor.
Reynolds has transformed Iowa in fundamental ways. She reorganized the state government in 2023 and 2024, eliminating agencies and public advisory boards, concentrating more power in the governor’s office. Under Reynolds, the state income tax structure has gone from progressive to a flat tax, and further restrictions have been placed on property taxes, limiting revenue for state and local governments. At the same time, Reynolds has introduced Education Savings Accounts, a school voucher program modeled on Arizona’s, where vouchers have become a crippling burden on the state budget.
The full impact of these massive changes hasn’t been felt yet, and won’t be felt until Reynolds is out of office. What happens to services people depend on when state and local tax revenue drop (as federal cuts likely continue)? What happens to already underfunded public schools as more and more money is funneled to private schools through vouchers? Will the reorganized state government be able to effectively deal with those and other problems — climate change, a shrinking market for corn ethanol, the possibility of another major disease outbreak either among animals on Iowa’s factory farms or humans?
Perhaps it’ll all work out for the best. In any case, they’re questions for the next governor(s) to deal with it. Reynolds is getting out of Des Moines while the getting is still good.
Kim Reynolds is a historic figure, there’s no question about that.
She ascended from the lieutenant governor’s seat to the state’s highest office on May 24, 2017, after Gov. Terry Branstad left to join the Trump administration. Already the first woman governor of Iowa (and 39th nationwide), she became the first woman to be elected governor by Iowans over a year later.
What will secure Reynolds a noteworthy place in U.S. history books, however, is the fact she’s the first governor to cut a state’s civil rights act in order to strip legal protections from some of her citizens.
SF 418, which Reynolds signed into law on Feb. 28, eliminated gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act, erasing protections for trans and nonbinary Iowans that had been in place for almost 20 years. But the bill will do more than end civil rights protection for a vulnerable minority when it goes into effect July 1 — it also makes fundamental changes to state law, ending any official recognition of trans and nonbinary people.
The bill redefines gender as nothing more than a synonym for sex, and only allows the state to recognize two sexes, male and female. A person’s gender/sex will be whatever the doctor entered on their birth certificate at the time of their birth.
The state will not make any accommodations for trans people according to their identities as trans people, nor will it permit local governments to do so. Iowa law will now officially contain a grim echo from America’s history of legal racial segregation that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 71 years ago.
“The term ‘equal’ does not mean ‘same’ or ‘identical,” SF 418 states. “Separate accommodations are not inherently unequal.”
The bill was proposed not to address any existing problem in Iowa, but as a matter of ideological commitment on the part of the governor and Republican leaders in the legislature. Reynolds has always been an enthusiastic and early adopter of whatever the rightwing cultural grievance of the day is, from banning teaching about “divisive concepts” like racism and sexism in schools to hyping a nonexistent “war on meat” (the governor declared Iowa was on the side of meat), to participating in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s photo ops stoking fears of immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The bill Reynolds signed in February was the latest in a series of anti-trans bills, which began in 2022 with the banning of trans girls and women from participating in school and college sports on teams that match their identity. There had never been a problem with trans student athletes reported in Iowa. It didn’t matter. Medical experts, mental health professionals and educators who work with trans students all opposed the bill. It didn’t matter. The bill passed with only Republican support, and Reynolds held a signing ceremony surrounded by children.
This year’s historic bill also passed with only Republican support, moving through the legislature at breakneck speed. It was exactly one week between the bill’s introduction and Reynolds signing it. It hit Reynolds’ desk the same day it passed the Iowa House and Senate. It wasn’t the first bill the legislature passed this year, but it was the first one Reynolds signed into law.
The last time a bill passed that quickly also involved stripping rights away from Iowans.
In 2023, Reynolds called a special one-day session of the Iowa Legislature so Republicans could pass one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. Reynolds waited three days before signing that bill, so she could sign it at the annual “summit” meeting of The Family Leader, a powerful rightwing Christian political organization and one of her biggest backers.
Reynolds credits leading the state through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with changing how she approached her role as governor.
“I just came out a different governor,” she told the reporters during the Easter egg hunt at the governor’s mansion. “Appreciative, not afraid to move on stuff that I believed in. So if you see things that need change, you go for it.”
Reynolds often talks proudly about minimizing the economic impact of COVID in Iowa, and working to keep meat-processing plants operating, even as the virus spread rapidly in the plants, sickening workers and killing many. Of course, that last part isn’t something the governor mentions when she talks about COVID.
The pandemic was the biggest surge in preventable deaths in the state’s history. And according to an analysis of COVID deaths by the founding dean of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, Reynolds’ policies contributed to the death toll.
“It is instructive to compare Iowa and Minnesota, which have nearly identical proportions of their populations at high risk because of being 65 years of age and older (17%). Minnesota, however, has nearly double the proportion of minorities, a second well-established risk factor for increased COVID-19 mortality,” Dr. James A. Merchant wrote in an op-ed published by the Des Moines Register in October 2021. “Yet, Iowa has suffered 99 per 100,000 population more COVID-19 deaths than has Minnesota, a total of over 3,000 excess preventable deaths for Iowa’s population of 3.155 million as of 2019.”
Merchant, also the former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health at the CDC’s Division of Respiratory Disease Studies, attributed the difference in the death rate to the difference in political leadership.
Futile Wrath by Sam Locke Ward, published in Little Village’s June 2020 issue. 
Stress Fractures by John Martinek, published in Little Village’s August 2020 issue. 
Stress Fractures by John Martinek, published in Little Village’s August 2021 issue. 
Futile Wrath by Sam Locke Ward, published in Little Village’s May 2025 issue.
Minnesota enacted strong public health mitigation measures; Iowa didn’t. The state undertook very limited mitigation efforts. Reynolds focused on preventing disruption to businesses. The governor and Republican leaders in the legislature also prohibited local governments and school districts from creating their own mask mandates or requiring proof of COVID vaccination status (while allowing them to require proof of the other vaccinations mandated by state law); and created penalties for any business that required proof of COVID vaccination from customers.
There was plenty of pushback against Reynolds’ approach to handling the pandemic — from Democratic lawmakers, from local officials of both parties, from the Iowa Board of Medicine and even from President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. All of them wanted the governor to do more. She didn’t.
“I’m really proud of just the herculean team effort that I think we’ve put in place to help serve Iowans through this really difficult time,” Reynolds said in early March 2021, just before the one-year anniversary of the state’s first COVID cases.
“I still have almost two years left,” Reynolds reminded the reporters at the egg hunt. The governor promised to remain focused on her duties during her time left in office.
“I am a hard charger, like, I am all-in, always have been,” she said enthusiastically. “And I’m going to sprint hard right across the finish line.”
The 20 months between now and that Tuesday in January 2027 when the next governor is sworn in may be a sprint for Reynolds, but they’ll be a long slog for the rest of Iowa. At the end of March, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis published its preliminary analysis of how state economies performed in 2024. Iowa ranked 49th in economic growth and 48th in personal income growth.
The agri-business-industrial complex at the center of Iowa’s economy is particularly vulnerable to President Trump’s international trade tantrums. Most of Iowa’s ag exports go to a handful of countries, notably China, Mexico and Japan, all of which have been targeted with arbitrary tariffs. The major export market for Iowa’s ethanol is Canada, where anti-U.S. sentiment is growing in response to Trump’s tariffs and gratuitously insulting rhetoric.
Even if it was economically secure, industrial ag exacts a heavy toll on Iowa, polluting the air, contaminating the water and wasting the top soil. Rural areas of the state have struggling healthcare systems. A third of Iowa’s counties are considered maternity care deserts. Food banks around the state report seeing record levels of food insecurity. The exodus of talented young people continues. Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancers in the country.
There’s very little in Reynolds’ record as governor to suggest she’ll make substantial progress on any of those urgent problems during her remaining time in office. But just in terms of Reynolds’ legacy, leaving all that, and more, for her successor to grapple with won’t matter much. Because Gov. Kim Reynolds has already secured her place in history.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2025 issue.
