Attorney General Candidate, Nate Willems
Candidate Website: https://www.facebook.com/willemsforiowa/Β
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General Election: Tuesday, November 3, 2026
Nate Willems grew up in Anamosa, Iowa, and now lives in Mount Vernon with his wife, Maggie, and their three daughters, where the family attends First Presbyterian Church and Willems has served on the church session. He holds a bachelor's degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a law degree from the University of Iowa College of Law.
Willems served two terms in the Iowa House of Representatives, representing District 29 from 2009 to 2013. Since 2010, he's been a partner at Rush & Nicholson, P.L.C. in Cedar Rapids β Iowa's largest workers' compensation firm β representing nurses, custodians, police officers, and factory workers in wage and employment disputes. His work has recovered roughly $15 million for 11,000 current and former University of Iowa hospital and clinic workers, $1.7 million for custodians shortchanged by their employer, and a 42 percent wage increase for Carter Lake police officers. He serves on the executive board of the Hawkeye Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO.
Willems announced his campaign for Attorney General in May 2025, the first Democrat to enter the race. βIowans deserve an attorney general who will fight for their rights and stand up to powerful interests,β Willems has said. βI'll ensure working families get the justice they deserve.β
Fun fact: Willems has spent two decades as Iowa's go-to lawyer for workers who've been cheated out of wages β recovering tens of millions of dollars for nurses, custodians, and police officers along the way.
Nate Willems is running to refocus the Attorney General's office on protecting everyday Iowans β workers, consumers, seniors, and crime victims β instead of national partisan lawsuits.
Protecting your paycheck. Willems has proposed creating a dedicated Wage Theft Recovery Unit inside the Attorney General's office to investigate and prosecute wage theft and worker misclassification, citing estimates that wage theft costs Iowa workers roughly $900 million a year β ten times the amount lost to all other forms of theft in the state combined. His plan includes a worker hotline, civil litigation seeking damages and attorney fees for victims, and criminal prosecution of the worst offenders in partnership with county attorneys.
Consumer protection. Willems has pledged to hold corporations accountable for fraud against Iowa families and to combat price gouging.
Public safety. Willems supports holding violent criminals accountable, backing first responders, and standing up for crime victims.
Protecting seniors. Willems wants to crack down on elder scams and fraud and enforce nursing home safety standards.
Environmental enforcement. Willems supports using the Attorney General's authority to penalize corporate polluters for contaminating Iowa's air and water.
Iowa first. Willems has campaigned explicitly on redirecting the Attorney General's office away from national partisan litigation and back toward Iowa-specific consumer, worker, and public-safety priorities.
Nate Willems's campaign for Attorney General has already earned a direct local endorsement in the Cedar Valley: Black Hawk County Elections Manager Karen Showalter is among his listed supporters.
Willems's labor-focused platform lines up closely with Black Hawk County's economy. He's been endorsed by the Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, SEIU, the UAW, Teamsters Local 238, and the International Association of Machinists β unions with real membership in a county built around manufacturing and organized labor at employers like John Deere and Tyson, along with a large healthcare workforce. His proposed Wage Theft Recovery Unit speaks directly to workers in those industries.
This is also one of the closest statewide races on the 2026 ballot β polling in the spring of 2026 showed Willems within two points of incumbent Brenna Bird β which makes Black Hawk County turnout for the Attorney General's race as consequential as it is for any other statewide contest this cycle.
Nate Willems's opponent for Iowa Attorney General is Republican incumbent Brenna Bird, who unseated 40-year incumbent Tom Miller in 2022 and is now seeking a second term.
Background. Willems has spent nearly two decades representing working Iowans in wage and employment disputes. Bird grew up on a farm near Dexter, served as chief of staff to U.S. Representative Steve King and as counsel to Governor Terry Branstad, and worked as a county attorney before her 2022 election.
Day-one changes. After taking office in January 2023, Bird fired or forced the resignation of 19 staffers just before Christmas, including a director with years of institutional experience, and removed nearly a decade of consumer-protection newsletter archives and more than two decades of news releases from the office's website.
Sexual assault victim services. In April 2023, Bird's office paused reimbursements for emergency contraception and abortion care for sexual assault victims under a state fund built from criminal fines β leaving more than 160 claims stuck for over a year while an βauditβ was conducted. A Gazette editorial called the pause βa cruel policy.β Reimbursements resumed roughly a year later.
National litigation. Bird has joined more than a dozen multistate lawsuits against federal policy on issues ranging from student loan relief to disability-rights healthcare rules, and has defended Iowa's abortion ban in court. Willems has campaigned on redirecting the office away from this kind of national partisan litigation and back toward Iowa-specific wage theft, consumer protection, and public safety work.
The race. Both national party organizations β the Democratic and Republican Attorneys General Associations β are investing in this race, which recent polling has shown to be a toss-up.
The bottom line: this is a race between a workers'-rights lawyer who wants to bring wage theft enforcement and consumer protection back to the center of the Attorney General's mission, and an incumbent whose first term has been defined by a sweeping staff purge, a widely criticized pause in support for sexual assault victims, and a heavy focus on national partisan lawsuits.