Joni Ernst
Joni Kay Ernst is an American politician and retired military officer serving since 2015 as the junior United States senator from Iowa. She is a member of the Republican Party.
After graduating from Iowa State University, Ernst joined the United States Army Reserve. She served in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1993 to 2015, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. During the Iraq War, she served as commanding officer of the 1168th Transportation Company in Kuwait and later commanded the 185th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion at Camp Dodge.
Ernst served in the Iowa State Senate from 2011 to 2014 and as auditor of Montgomery County from January 2005 to January 5, 2011. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2014 and reelected in 2020. As chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee from 2023 to 2025, Ernst was the fourth-ranking Republican in the Senate. During her Senate tenure, she has called for reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. During the Trump administration, she expressed concern about Trump's trade war with China, and as a war hawk, criticized some of his foreign policy. While supporting both of Trump's nominees for EPA administrator, she expressed concern over their commitment to the Renewable Fuel Standard.
On September 2, 2025, Ernst announced that she would not seek reelection in 2026.
Early life and career
Ernst was born Joni Kay Culver in Montgomery County, Iowa, the daughter of Marilyn and Richard Culver. She was valedictorian of her class at Stanton Community School District High School. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Iowa State University in 1992, and a Master of Public Administration degree from Columbus State University in 1995. In college, she took part in an agricultural exchange to the Soviet Union.Military career
Ernst joined Iowa State University's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program when she was 20, and the United States Army Reserve after graduating. She served as a logistics officer and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard. In 2003–2004, she spent 12 months in Kuwait as commander of the 1168th Transportation Company, during the Iraq War. Near the end of her military career, she served as the commanding officer of the 185th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion at Camp Dodge, the Iowa Army National Guard's largest battalion. Upon her retirement from the military in 2015, Ernst had served 23 years in the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard. Her awards included the Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, and Global War on Terrorism Service Medal.In an interview with Time magazine in 2014, Ernst said she was sexually harassed in the military, saying, "I had comments, passes, things like that" that she was able to stop, and said she would support removing the chain of command from the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault cases.
Iowa politics
Ernst was elected Montgomery County Auditor in 2004, defeating the incumbent, Connie Magneson. She ran unopposed in 2008 and was reelected with 4,569 votes. She was elected to the Iowa State Senate in a special election in 2011 and reelected in 2012. She represented District 12, in southwestern Iowa.Upon her election to the U.S. Senate, Ernst resigned from the Iowa State Senate, effective November 28, 2014.
U.S. Senate
Elections
2014
In July 2013, Ernst announced that she would seek the Senate seat held by retiring Democratic Senator Tom Harkin. Iowa Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds endorsed her in October 2013. In March 2014, Ernst was endorsed by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, to whom she has drawn comparisons. In May 2014, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group, endorsed her.Little known at the start of her campaign, Ernst was boosted in the Republican primary by the Koch brothers with "hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of television ads and tens of thousands of dollars in direct campaign contributions". A Koch-backed group launched an "advertising blitz", including a $257,000 campaign against Ernst's biggest Republican rival, oil executive Mark Jacobs, who had supported a proposal to limit carbon emissions that Koch Industries opposed. Ernst privately credited the Kochs and their allies for having "really started my trajectory" after her primary victory.
Ernst received widespread attention for a campaign advertisement she released in March 2014, in which she made a tongue-in-cheek comparison between her experience castrating pigs and her ability to "cut pork" in Congress. Many found the ad humorous, and it was spoofed by late-night comedians, including Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert. Before the ad aired, Ernst had struggled to raise money, and two polls of the Republican primary taken in February 2014 had shown her in second place, several points behind Mark Jacobs. After it aired, a Suffolk University poll in early April showed her with a narrow lead and a Loras College poll showed her essentially tied with Jacobs. By May, she was being described in the media as the "strong front-runner".
During the primary, Ernst promoted a conspiracy theory that a United Nations sustainable development plan, Agenda 21, could lead to farmers being forced off their land and made to live in cities, but a few months later she said she did not consider the plan a "threat".
In a May 2014 Des Moines Register interview, Ernst said she was "extremely offended" by comments Jacobs made characterizing her as AWOL due to missing over 100 votes in the legislative session. Previously, in The Gazette, Ernst cited her National Guard duty to rebuff criticism about her missing votes, but The Gazette found that only 12 of the 117 missed votes came on days when she was on duty. The other 105 missed votes represented 57% of the Iowa Senate votes that session. Ernst's spokesman said she had a better than 90% voting record during her Senate career and that she had never claimed Guard service was the only reason she had missed votes.
In July, Ernst delivered the Republican Party's weekly address, criticizing a health care scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs and calling for a balanced budget and reform of Social Security and Medicare. Later that month, she suspended her campaign while participating in two weeks of National Guard duty.
In endorsing her for the Republican primary nomination, the Des Moines Register wrote: "Ernst is a smart, well-prepared candidate who can wrestle with the details of public policy from a conservative perspective without seeming inflexible." On October 23, Ernst canceled a scheduled meeting with the Des Moines Register's editorial board, citing the paper's negative editorials about her. The editorial board ultimately endorsed Braley, citing Ernst's calls to abolish the EPA, the Department of Education, and the federal minimum wage, as well as her support for partially privatizing Social Security and overturning the Affordable Care Act.
In the 2014 election, Ernst received $17,552,085 in "dark money", which constituted 74% of non-party outside spending in her support; she had a $14 million outside spending advantage over her opponent. In an October 2014 debate, Ernst said she “believe in political free speech” and did not see a need to change campaign finance laws.
Ernst won the election by 94,205 votes. She is the first woman elected to represent Iowa in either house of Congress.
2020
Ernst ran for reelection in 2020. She was unopposed in the Republican primary and faced Democratic nominee Theresa Greenfield, a businesswoman and former congressional candidate, in the general election. Ernst was seen as the strong favorite and eventually defeated her opponent, by 110,138 votes.In December 2019, the Associated Press reported that Ernst's campaign had closely coordinated with a political nonprofit founded by a longtime consultant; such groups are tax-exempt and not required to disclose donors, but cannot make political campaigning their primary purpose and must separate their activities from candidates they support. An Ernst campaign adviser said that any implication they had acted outside the "spirit of the law" was "fake news". After the article's publication, the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
2026
On September 2, 2025, Ernst announced that she would not seek reelection in 2026.Tenure
Ernst was sworn into the United States Senate on January 3, 2015, and thus became Iowa's first new U.S. senator since Tom Harkin in 1985. She delivered the official Republican response to the State of the Union on January 20.In May 2016, Chris Cillizza put Ernst on his short list of possible vice presidential running mates for Donald Trump to become the 45th President of the United States. Other media outlets also mentioned her as a possible benefit to Trump's campaign. On June 16, Ernst said no one had "reached out" to her about a vice-presidential nomination. On July 4, she and Trump met privately. Trump selected Governor Mike Pence of Indiana on July 15.
In 2016, Ernst and other Republican senators introduced "Sarah's Law" in honor of Sarah Root, a 21-year-old student in Omaha who was killed in a street racing crash earlier that year.
In 2017, Ernst asked Secretary of Defense nominee James Mattis whether he would pledge to cut wasteful spending and stop sexual assault in the military, to which Mattis agreed.
In March, after photographs of nude female soldiers were posted on Facebook, Ernst said that this "type of activity creates a culture that leads to sexual assault." At a press conference two weeks later, she asked Congress to pass a law requiring people to immediately report suspected sexual assault at government facilities.
Ernst was elected vice chair of the Senate Republican Conference in November 2018.
On the initiation of the 116th United States Congress in 2019, Ernst became the first female Republican to be appointed to the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with Marsha Blackburn.
In March 2019, after the Special Counsel Investigation concluded and Attorney General William Barr released an abridged summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, Ernst called for a release of the report's full findings, saying, "as much of the report that can be made public should be".
In August 2020, when Iowa had the most new COVID-19 infections per capita of any state in the preceding seven days, Ernst repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that the case numbers were greatly inflated and that health care providers might be falsifying them. She later walked back her statements.
After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death in September 2020, Ernst said she supported Trump nominating a new justice before the November presidential election. Eight months before the 2016 presidential election, Ernst opposed Senate consideration of Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, saying "the American people deserve to have a say" on a decision that would "impact the course of our country for years to come". In 2018, Ernst reiterated that Supreme Court nominees should not be heard during presidential election years, telling the Des Moines Register, "It's precedent set.... So come 2020, if there's an opening, I'm sure you'll remind me of that."
Ernst was participating in the certification of the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. She called the storming "a protest turned anarchy" and, citing that she served in the military to defend the right to peacefully protest, "a complete betrayal of those sacred ideals." When Congress returned to the certification process, Ernst voted to support certification. She opposed impeaching Trump for the attack on the Capitol, choosing to support a peaceful transfer of power and "healing our nation." In response, The Gazette editorial board wrote that Ernst and Grassley "must reckon with why they did the wrong thing for so long" regarding their support of Trump during his presidency.
In a September 2021 Fox News interview, Ernst accused President Joe Biden of overstepping presidential powers and "leading by coercion" with the newly announced "Path Out of the Pandemic" initiative, aimed at mitigating the rising threat of the COVID-19 Delta variant. "Forcing these federal mandates was one way to divert us", she said. "This is a diversion away from 9/11, away from the 20th anniversary and away from the debacle that was his Afghanistan withdrawal". The previous week, Biden had signed an executive order declassifying 9/11 documents that the victims' families had requested for many years; his agenda on September 11, 2021, included visits to three 9/11 crash sites in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
In March 2024, Ernst announced that she would run for Senate Republican Conference chair in 2025, a position that Senator Tom Cotton was also seeking. Cotton was elected conference chair.