The longest-serving state attorney general in American history, Iowa Democrat Tom Miller, was quietly defeated on Election Night by Republican Brenna Bird after holding the position for four decades.
Bird managed to avoid the midterm fate of many of her fellow Trump-backed candidates by keeping her focus on local issues relevant to Iowans, she told National Review in an interview conducted days after she edged out Miller by more than 20,000 votes, winning the race by nearly two percentage points.
Since Bird launched her campaign back in January, she has made a point of prioritizing law enforcement and actively challenging Biden administration overreach on issues such as environmental regulations that matter deeply to voters in the agricultural state.
“Our campaign was focused on backing the blue and holding Biden accountable,” Bird said.
While Iowa is among the safer states in America, it has not been immune to the nationwide spike in violence. Iowa’s violent-crime rate spiked nearly 14 percent in 2021. By Election Day, Bird had secured endorsements from the vast majority of sheriffs across Iowa’s 99 counties, Republicans and Democrats. Bird says that effort set her apart from her predecessor, who she claims overlooked the importance of building deep relationships with county sheriffs.
“What we found with getting the support of 75 current sheriffs is that most of them didn’t have a relationship at all with the attorney general. That’s something that will change when I’m attorney general,” she said.
In an op-ed published the week prior to the election, Bird highlighted some of the specific policies she’d pursue to support the police, including conducting a victim-services audit to ensure that victims of crime receive adequate support and starting a new cold-case unit to bolster the state’s homicide-clearance rate.
“I will do everything I can to ensure Iowa doesn’t go the way of Chicago or Minneapolis. Those cities are plagued by crime and prosecutors who do not enforce our law, and who look for any reason to release dangerous criminals back on the streets,” Bird wrote in the Des Moines Register.
Bird also positioned herself as the down-home alternative to a Democratic incumbent who she claims was bent on appeasing Democratic Party leaders in Washington.
“I was born and raised on our family farm near Dexter, which is in western Iowa. I was homeschooled. I was in 4-H. I went to Drake University and then after that I went to the University of Chicago for law,” she said.
By comparison, Bird has painted the Harvard-educated Miller as out of touch with everyday Iowans, citing the high-profile cases Miller prosecuted against Google, Microsoft, and big tobacco throughout his lengthy tenure.
Miller has cultivated a reputation for helping Iowa punch “way, way over its weight,” Maine’s former attorney general James Tierney told Bloomberg. But that reputation may have made Miller susceptible to Bird’s messaging that glitzy lawsuits distracted him from the issues ordinary Iowans care about. Bird repeatedly accused Miller of ignoring Iowans’ concerns about EPA overreach and much else in favor of targeting large corporations to score partisan points. She criticized Miller during a debate in October for “not doing the job you used to do. You’ve retired on the job.”
Throughout the campaign, Bird embraced issues she believes resonate with her Washington-skeptical constituents in Iowa, taking aim at certain Obamacare provisions and the latest EPA regulations affecting the farming-heavy state.
“The EPA is out of control, and they want to control how farmers farm,” Bird said. “It’s not easy to be a farmer. I was born and raised on a family farm. My brother’s a seventh-generation farmer. I know what it’s all about and it’s very competitive. . . . Iowa farmers really feed the world.”
Bird cultivated her understanding of Iowans’ priorities while working her way up through state politics over the last two decades. She began her career with Republican representative Steve King, first as his deputy chief of staff, and later as his chief of staff, between 2003 and 2010. A few years after Bird’s departure, King’s political career imploded thanks in part to his support for noxious figures, such as Faith Goldy, a white supremacist who ran for mayor of Toronto.
Bird’s victory complicates the popular narrative that coalesced in the wake of the Republican Party’s disappointing midterm elections. Namely, that Trump is a liability and must be ditched, post-haste, if the party wishes to have any chance of competing in 2024.
But Bird differs sharply from many of the MAGA candidates who went down in flames on Election Night: Instead of litigating culture war issues or the 2020 election, she leveraged her deep knowledge of Iowa and the issues Iowans care about it to achieve victory.