Governor Kim Reynolds ordered flags flown at half-staff across Iowa on June 20, the day Republican State Senator Julian Garrett was laid to rest. Garrett passed away on June 8 after a long illness, which caused him to miss the entirety of the 2026 legislative session.
In statements released following Garrett’s death, leaders from both parties offered their condolences and honored his work as a legislator, farmer, and attorney.
I want to highlight another important aspect of the senator’s life: he showed unusual persistence in the face of political setbacks.
A lifelong conservative activist
Garrett’s involvement in politics spanned more than six decades. Former Governor Terry Branstad recalled that Garrett invited him to a Young Republicans meeting in the 1960s, when Branstad was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa and Garrett was a law student there. Chuck Grassley—then a member of the Iowa House—was the speaker at that meeting, which prompted Branstad to get involved with the GOP.
When the Senate discussed a resolution honoring Garrett’s service on April 16 of this year, Democratic State Senator Tony Bisignano argued that Garrett “was the reason that Terry Branstad became a Republican.”
Several GOP colleagues mentioned that day how proud Garrett was to have chaired Ronald Reagan’s campaign twice in what was then Iowa’s fifth Congressional district. He backed Reagan as a 1976 challenger to then President Gerald Ford (a more moderate Republican) and again in 1980, Reagan’s first successful presidential campaign.
Garrett wasn’t only working to elect other conservatives. From a young age, he aspired to serve in office himself. It didn’t come as easily to him as it did to his longtime friend Branstad.
An early bid for state Senate
Voters in Warren and Madison counties elected Garrett to the legislature six times, beginning in 2010. But even among Iowa politics watchers, few know Garrett unsuccessfully ran for office at least three times before he won his first state House race.
I’ve stumped many people—including some legislators—with this trivia question: who was Tom Harkin’s Republican challenger in 1978, when Harkin represented Iowa’s fifth district in the U.S. House?
Just this month I learned that wasn’t Garrett’s first campaign.
Former State Representative Jon Thorup shared this photo of an ad, which he found in his personal collection of Indianola newspapers.
I knew Garrett had worked as an assistant attorney general focusing on consumer protection issues for twelve years, beginning in 1967. I had never heard of a legislative campaign so early in his career.
It took a while to find the answer in the official canvass of the 1968 primary election. Garrett finished third out of four Republican candidates in Iowa Senate district 11, winning 945 votes (a little more than 20 percent).
That must have been discouraging. But it didn’t stop Garrett from trying again.
A “longshot” bid for Congress
In 1978, Republicans were searching for a challenger to take on U.S. Representative Tom Harkin, then serving his second term in Congress.
The fifth district covered all of southwest Iowa, stretching as far east as Story County, Warren County, and Wayne County along the southern tier.
Iowa Congressional map used from 1973 through 1982, created by the U.S. Department of the Interior
Today that district would be solidly Republican. But plenty of New Deal and Kennedy Democrats lived in rural Iowa in those days. Harkin defeated GOP incumbent William Scherle in the post-Watergate Democratic landslide of 1974. He was re-elected in 1976 with 64.9 percent of the vote to 34.1 percent for GOP challenger Kenny Fulk.
According to an April 21, 1978 article by Des Moines Register reporter Chuck Offenburger, a group of Republican legislators tried to recruit Scherle for the 1978 race, but he declined. Fulk had moved out of state, so the GOP field was wide open.
Garrett took unpaid leave from the Attorney General’s office to run for Congress and gained about 54 percent of the vote against a GOP primary opponent. He and Harkin clashed over government spending (especially the defense budget) and tax cuts in their two televised debates, the Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil reported in a November 3, 1978 review of the campaign.
Speaking to Offenburger for a Des Moines Register article published on October 20, 1978, Garrett acknowledged his race was initially considered “pretty much of a longshot.” He trailed Harkin in fundraising and had a much smaller campaign staff but had “logged more than 20,000 miles” traveling around the district.
Offenburger reported that in his speeches, Garrett accused Harkin of voting “with the extreme liberal portion of Congress” while posturing as a moderate back home. The Republican told the journalist, “There’s just no question that on the issues, and in general political philosophy, I am much closer to the way the people of the district think.” He asserted that “If Harkin wasn’t an incumbent, this wouldn’t even be a contest.”
Harkin won the election by 82,333 votes to 57,377 (58.9 percent to 41.1 percent). It must have been disappointing for the challenger.
Garrett stayed involved with politics as a decades-long member of the Warren County Republican central committee. He didn’t give up on running for office, though.
Three open seats, two victories
Iowa Senate district 37, covering Warren and Madison counties, became an open seat in 2006 when moderate Republican Doug Shull decided not to seek re-election. He had alienated conservatives by voting against a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in 2004.
Garrett won a two-way GOP primary with about 55 percent of the vote. But 2006 was a bad year to be on the ballot as a Republican. A blue wave carried Democrat Staci Appel to victory with about 51.5 percent of the vote to Garrett’s 48.4 percent.
Four years later, Republican State Representative Jodi Tymeson decided not to seek another term in House district 74, which made up half of Senate district 37. Again, Garrett sought the open seat. He won a three-way primary with just under 44 percent of the vote. Bolstered by a red wave nationally and in Iowa, he took more than 64 percent in November 2010.
A few days before his 70th birthday, Garrett achieved a goal he’d begun pursuing in his 20s. How many people would have kept trying?
Garrett won a second term in the state House but did not complete it, because GOP State Senator Kent Sorenson resigned in disgrace in October 2013. Four Republicans sought the nomination to run in the subsequent special election for Senate district 13, and Garrett won on the first ballot at the district convention. He won the special election by nearly 20 points and won a full four-year term in 2014 by an even wider margin.
Republicans spent some money defending Garrett’s seat in 2018, and he was re-elected with nearly 56 percent of the vote. The last time he ran for office in 2022, the renumbered Senate district 11 wasn’t on either party’s target list, and he won with more than 61 percent.
“A dog on a bone”
As a legislator, Garrett was known for his tenacity.
When colleagues honored his service on April 16, Republican Senator Dan Dawson recalled that Garrett “never backed off his principles.” In fact, Dawson said, some in the GOP caucus compared him to a “dog on a bone” because he could be relentless.
For at least a decade, Garrett worked on legislation to require Iowa businesses to use the federal e-Verify system to confirm employees were eligible to work in the U.S. The Senate approved versions of such legislation, which didn’t get through the lower chamber. (This year, the House and Senate passed and Governor Reynolds signed a bill that will require all public employers in Iowa “to use E-Verify and SAVE to confirm the citizenship status and employment eligibility of new hires.”)
Another priority was changing the judicial selection system Iowa had adopted in 1962. According to Dawson, Garrett began urging his colleagues to overhaul the judicial nominating process in 2017, the first year Republicans controlled the Senate. They didn’t move to increase the governor’s power to influence the State Judicial Nominating Commission until 2019, after Reynolds had been elected to a full four-year term.
Garrett continued to push for altering the commissions that nominate finalists for District Court judgeships. He wanted to remove judges from those panels and give the governor an extra appointee. Over strong objections from Democrats, Senate Republicans approved such bills in 2023 and again in 2025, but House Republicans refused to go along with the plan.
Reinstating the death penalty was another priority for Garrett. Several times, he voted to advance capital punishment bills from subcommittees. At least twice, he and other Republicans got a death penalty bill through the full Senate Judiciary Committee. Those bills never came up for a floor vote. But Garrett continued to work on crafting a narrow definition of capital murder offenses, in the hope of gaining more support for the idea.
He also used his influence to block bills. Four times, the Iowa House approved versions of “anti-SLAPP” legislation unanimously or nearly so. The goal was to help Iowans defend against lawsuits brought to chill their First Amendment expression, and get meritless suits dismissed promptly.
Garrett believed anti-SLAPP bills violated the constitutional right to a trial by jury. He also maintained such laws were unnecessary, since defendants can seek to avoid a trial through a motion for summary judgment. Almost single-handedly, he kept anti-SLAPP legislation from getting out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, year after year. It took new leadership on that committee to get a bill onto the Senate floor and to the governor’s desk in 2025.
I strongly opposed Garrett’s position on all of the above issues. But as misguided as he could be (from my perspective), I believe everyone can learn from how he kept pushing for his priorities. Stubbornness can be an asset at the statehouse—for legislators as well as for advocates.
“Classic debates”
Dawson remembered how Garrett’s remarks on the Senate floor sometimes ignited heated reactions from Democrats. He observed that Garrett “never had any animosity” or hatred toward his adversaries in those “classic debates.”
Bisignano, who served on more subcommittees with Garrett than any other Democrat, said they “were able to work together on some very controversial things with a lot of respect.”
My coverage of various bills Garrett floor managed was often critical. Nevertheless, he would answer my questions after subcommittee meetings, and I don’t recall any hostile interactions.
Five years ago, I emailed the House leader of the Justice Systems Appropriations Subcommittee with questions about the judicial branch budget. Some of my questions stemmed from a faulty premise, because I was confusing the general fund appropriations for the whole judicial branch with salary increases for Iowa judges. The House member and I were talking past each other, but once he looped his Senate counterpart into the email chain, Garrett (the Senate’s top appropriator for the judicial branch) recognized our misunderstanding and clarified the numbers for me. He didn’t accuse me of deliberately misrepresenting or distorting any facts.
Near the end of his tribute on April 16, Bisignano said he “enjoyed Julian,” despite being “exact polar opposites.” Sometimes “those become people you admire the most,” he suggested, because “they don’t quit. He stuck with his, and I stuck with mine. And I do miss him this year. I haven’t had a good, really, fight. You guys are nothing compared to Julian.”
Final note: since the legislature is not scheduled to reconvene before the next general election, there will be no special election to fill the vacancy in Senate district 11. Garrett’s successor will be one of two candidates on the November ballot: Republican Hollie Zajicek (the Economic Development Director for the City of Norwalk) and Democrat Sinikka Waugh (a small business owner in Warren County).
You can watch more than a dozen senators honor Julian Garrett on the official legislative video from April 16, starting around the 12:48:00 mark.