Kimberly Kay Reynolds (née Strawn; born August 4, 1959) is an American politician serving since 2017 as the 43rd governor of Iowa. A member of the Republican Party, she is the first female governor in Iowa history.
Reynolds was elected Clarke County treasurer in 1994 and served for four terms in that office. She then served a partial term in the Iowa Senate from 2009 to 2011. From 2011 to 2017, Reynolds served as the 46th lieutenant governor of Iowa. She became governor in May 2017 when Governor Terry Branstad stepped down to become the United States ambassador to China. Reynolds won a full term as governor in 2018 and was reelected in 2022.
Reynolds has signed legislation providing for educational vouchers as well as legislation supporting voting rights for felons and Second Amendment rights. Reynolds received poor approval ratings in 2020 for her handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. She has a close relationship with the Iowa pork industry. Reynolds delivered the Republican response to President Joe Biden's 2022 State of the Union Address. In 2023, she signed a six-week abortion ban into law, and in 2025, she signed a bill repealing anti-discrimination protections for transgender people, making Iowa the first state to remove anti-discrimination protections for any group of people.
On April 11, 2025, Reynolds announced she will not seek reelection in 2026.
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Early life and education
Reynolds was born Kimberly Kay Strawn in 1959 in St. Charles, Iowa. She graduated from high school at the Interstate 35 Community School District in 1977.
Reynolds attended Northwest Missouri State University, taking classes in business, consumer sciences and clothing sales and design, without earning a degree. She later took classes at Southeastern Community College in the late 1980s, and then accounting classes at Southwestern Community College between 1992 and 1995.
In 2012, Reynolds began taking classes in the bachelor of public administration program at Upper Iowa University.
In December 2016, shortly before Reynolds became governor, Iowa State University awarded her a Bachelor of Liberal Studies degree with three concentrations: political science, business management, and communications.
Early political career
Reynolds was elected Clarke County treasurer in 1994 and served four terms. While she was treasurer she was selected to join the American Council of Young Political Leaders on a trip to Taipei, Taiwan.
On November 4, 2008, Reynolds was elected to represent the 48th district in the Iowa Senate, defeating Democratic nominee Ruth Smith and independent candidate Rodney Schmidt. In 2010, Reynolds endorsed a ban on same-sex marriage in Iowa.
Lieutenant governor of Iowa (2011–2017)
On June 25, 2010, Republican gubernatorial nominee Terry Branstad publicly selected Reynolds to be his running mate as the lieutenant governor candidate. The next day, she received the Republican nomination at the Republican state convention. On November 2, 2010, the Branstad/Reynolds ticket won the general election. Reynolds resigned her Senate seat on November 12 before taking office as lieutenant governor.
Reynolds was sworn in as lieutenant governor of Iowa on January 14, 2011. She co-chaired the Governor's Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Advisory Council, Iowa Partnership for Economic Progress board, and the Military Children Education Coalition. She was also Branstad's representative on the board of the Iowa State Fair.
Reynolds was elected chair of the National Lieutenant Governors Association (NLGA) in July 2015.
Governor of Iowa (2017–present)
On May 24, 2017, Reynolds became governor of Iowa upon the resignation of Branstad, who stepped down to become United States Ambassador to China. She is Iowa's first female governor.
Elections
In June 2017, Reynolds said she would seek a full term as governor of Iowa in the 2018 election.
Reynolds's decision to have Representative Steve King co-chair her campaign stirred controversy, as King has a history of remarks that have been described as racist. The Des Moines Register editorial board wrote, "Gov. Kim Reynolds has kept him on as her campaign co-chairman, while muttering increasingly thin-lipped denials that she agrees with his ideological extremism." Reynolds had previously praised King, saying he was "a strong defender of freedom and our conservative values". After Election Day, Reynolds criticized King and said that he needed to change his approach.
Reynolds won the Republican nomination for governor and defeated Democrat Fred Hubbell and Libertarian Jake Porter in the general election, 50% to 48%. She won nearly the entire state west of Des Moines. In particular, she dominated the state's 4th congressional district, which she carried with 59% of the vote. Reynolds is the first woman elected governor of Iowa.
Reynolds was reelected to a second full term, defeating Democratic nominee Deidre DeJear, 58% to 40%.
First term
Reynolds's elevation to the governorship created a vacancy in the office of lieutenant governor. Reports indicated that Reynolds's selection of a lieutenant governor could be challenged in the Iowa Supreme Court. An opinion from the Attorney General of Iowa indicated that "an individual promoted from lieutenant governor to governor, as was Reynolds, [did] not have the authority to appoint a new lieutenant governor." On May 25, 2017, Reynolds announced that Iowa Public Defender Adam Gregg would serve as acting lieutenant governor; to avoid litigation, the Reynolds administration stated that Gregg "[would] not hold the official position of lieutenant governor" and would not succeed Reynolds in the event of her inability to serve as governor.
In 2018, Reynolds proposed cutting $10 million from Medicaid, which cares for eligible low-income adults, children, pregnant women, elderly adults and people with disabilities. In 2020, she proposed a one-cent increase in the state sales tax (bringing it to 8 cents), offset by a phased reduction in the state income tax, including a cut in the rate for the top bracket from 9% to 5.5%. Reynolds's proposed restructuring of the state tax code would represent a further reduction in income taxes, going beyond 2018 legislation (passed by Republicans in the state legislature and signed into law by Reynolds) that was the largest income tax cut in Iowa history. Her proposed sales-tax increase, however, was largely opposed by state legislators.
In 2018, after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Reynolds called same-sex marriage a "settled" issue and said that she did not consider herself obligated to follow the Iowa Republican Party platform provision against same-sex marriage.
Reynolds has supported some of Donald Trump's positions. She blocked two-thirds of requests from Democratic state Attorney General Tom Miller to join multi-state lawsuits challenging Trump administration policies or to submit amicus briefs in such suits; among the vetoed requests were proposals to challenge Trump policies related to immigration, asylum, abortion, birth control, environmental deregulation, gun policy, and LGBT rights. Reynolds blocked Miller from including Iowa in a legal challenge to the Trump administration's repeal of the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era regulation that restricted emissions of greenhouses gases (such as carbon) to counteract climate change. In 2018, she acknowledged that Trump's trade and tariff policies were hurting American farmers (as agriculture exports declined due to tariffs imposed by other nations in retaliation for Trump's tariffs), but then claimed that farmers would ultimately benefit. Reynolds made campaign appearances with Trump during the 2020 presidential campaign; in the November election, Trump carried Iowa, but lost nationally to Joe Biden, who won both the electoral vote and the national popular vote. After Trump's loss, Reynolds did not denounce Trump's false claims of election fraud and refused to acknowledge Biden's victory until January 2021, when Congress formally counted the electoral votes. She condemned the storming of the Capitol, which disrupted the counting of the electoral votes, but said many people believed the election was "not valid".
Second term
Reynolds began her first full term on January 18, 2019. In March 2019, she signed into law a bill requiring public universities to protect all speech on campus. Through her judicial appointments, Reynolds shifted the Iowa Supreme Court to the right. Her attorney, Sam Langholz, was appointed to a position in the attorney general's office to defend her policies in court.
In December 2019, Reynolds launched an anti-vaping social media campaign in an effort to reduce vaping among Iowa youth. In July 2020, she signed legislation that raised the minimum legal age to buy tobacco products, including vaping products, to 21.
From 2017 to April 2020, Reynolds restored the voting rights of 543 felons, more than the roughly 200 restorations that her predecessor gave over almost seven years in office. In August 2020, she signed an executive order permitting felons to vote in Iowa elections upon completing their sentence. Iowa previously imposed a lifetime ban on felons voting unless the governor personally restored their voting rights, the strictest law in the country. Explaining her order, Reynolds referred to her experiences two decades earlier, when she twice pleaded guilty to DUI and subsequently recovered from alcoholism, an experience she cites as an important turning point in her life.
Reynolds has a close relationship with the Iowa pork industry, and in particular with Iowa Select Farms, one of the country's largest pork producers. She donated an afternoon of her time as part of a 2019 charity auction to benefit the company's owners' foundation; the owners had contributed almost $300,000 to Reynolds's campaigns. A Republican donor who is influential in the pork industry placed the winning bid. The director of the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board said that he did not believe the auction violated state law, but attorneys for two former Democratic governors of Iowa said that it created the appearance of impropriety and was an error in judgment. In May and July 2020, Reynolds's administration arranged for COVID-19 testing to be done at Iowa Select's West Des Moines headquarters and at the Waverly facility partly owned by another campaign donor, at a time when those most vulnerable to the disease (healthcare workers and residents of nursing homes and other congregate-living facilities) were unable to timely get tested. A separate pork production company that had donated $25,000 to Reynolds's campaign received a disproportionate benefit from a state pandemic business-aid program, receiving 72% of the program's initial rounds of disbursements. After the testing came to light in January 2021, Polk County Supervisor Matt McCoy criticized Reynolds, and State Auditor Rob Sand began an investigation into whether special treatment was accorded to political donors over essential workers and vulnerable persons. In 2023, Reynolds signed legislation to strip the state auditor's powers. In 2025, she joined a letter opposing 2018 California Proposition 12 and supporting the Save Our Bacon Act (H.R. 4673).
Third term
On March 1, 2022, Reynolds was selected to deliver the Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address. On March 3, 2022, she signed into law a bill that bans transgender girls and women from participating on designated female sports teams. In January 2023, Reynolds signed the Students First Act, which made private school vouchers available in Iowa for the first time. On March 22, 2023, she signed a law banning the prescription of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-affirming surgery to minors, as well as a law prohibiting people from using school restrooms that do not align with their sex at birth.
In November 2023, Reynolds endorsed Ron DeSantis for the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries, saying she did not believe Trump could win the general election. She said she would endorse the Republican nominee and endorsed Trump in March 2024. Around this time, a survey found that Reynolds had the lowest approval rating of any U.S. governor.
In 2024, Reynolds signed a bill allowing state law enforcement to arrest undocumented migrants if they had previously been deported from or denied admission to the United States. The bill also enables state courts to issue deportation orders for such individuals. On February 1, 2024, she introduced a bill defining "man" and "woman" based on reproductive anatomy and requiring that official identification documents list sex at birth.
On February 28, 2025, Reynolds signed Senate File 418, which eliminated gender identity as a protected class from the Iowa Civil Rights Act. This made Iowa the first U.S. state to remove gender identity as a protected class from a civil rights law.
On April 11, 2025, Reynolds announced she will not seek reelection in 2026.
Personal life
Kim Reynolds married Kevin Reynolds in 1982. They have three children. Kevin Reynolds was diagnosed with lung cancer in September 2023.
Reynolds attends the Lutheran Church of Hope.
Reynolds was twice charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, in 1999 and in August 2000. In 2000, she was initially charged with Second Offense DUI, but was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. In 2017, Reynolds said she had sought inpatient treatment for alcoholism after her second arrest and had been sober for nearly 17 years.