There’s no shortage of tweets from semi-anonymous accounts about the Iowa Caucus on the platform Elon Musk has renamed X, and until this week, none of them seemed significant. But on Thursday, the New York Times reported that one of those accounts belongs to Gov. Kim Reynolds.
For the past year, Reynolds has tweeted about the Republicans running for president on her personal and political campaign account, @KimReynoldsIA. Most of Reynolds’ campaign-related tweeting has been done to promote Ron DeSantis. She endorsed the Florida governor in November, but her pro-DeSantis bent was obvious to many — including the Trump campaign — long before that.
But according to the Times, @KimReynoldsIA wasn’t the only account Reynolds was using to try to boost DeSantis as his campaign limps towards a crushing defeat in the Jan. 15 Iowa Caucus. (Trump led DeSantis by 32 percentage points in the most recent Iowa Poll.) Reynolds has also been using “@Kimberl26890376, where in recent months she has shared her unfiltered feelings on the state of affairs in the Republican primary ahead of the Iowa caucuses,” Shane Goldmacher and Nicholas Nehamas reported on Thursday.
After the story was published, @Kimberl26890376 was suspended by X and the account’s tweets are currently unavailable.
The reporters don’t explain how they found the account, which only had 259 followers as of Thursday morning, or how they determined it was Reynolds, since “it is in no way linked to either her verified political account or her official governor’s one, and it does not identify her as the governor of Iowa.”
The profile picture was a photo of Reynolds and the user’s name was “Kimberly Reynolds,” but it seems likely that one of the many “influential Iowa political operatives” who were among the account’s few followers tipped them off.
“A person familiar with the matter confirmed it was her account,” they wrote.
It is a truism of American journalism that no one is more impressed by the reporting of the New York Times than employees of the New York Times. Perhaps that’s why Goldmacher, Nehamas and the various editors involved in the story felt comfortable engaging in hyperbole by characterizing the tweets of Kimberl26890376 as Reynolds’ “unfiltered feelings.”
The account, created in 2021, only had 58 posts, most of which were retweets posted during the last few months. The two tweets Goldmacher and Nehamas cite as examples of Reynolds’ own writing express sentiments the governor has shared on record as well.
“Followed through 100% on promises made!!” Reynolds tweeted about DeSantis on the unofficial account in December. The other tweet, also from last month, is one word and an exclamation point: “Leader!”
The recent retweets were from official accounts like @DeSantisWarRoom, the rapid response team of the DeSantis campaign, as well as random DeSantis supporters. This month, the governor used her unofficial account to retweet Barbarian Steve, a DeSantis fan from Texas. Barbarian Steve (“Texas Aggie. Conservatarian and contrarian.”) posted side-by-side photos of DeSantis standing with his family, and a seated Trump with women standing behind them at a New Year’s Eve Party.
“The contrast is overwhelming… “ according to Barbarian Steve.
The contrast is overwhelming… pic.twitter.com/S4C9BjgtEH
— Barbarian Steve (@Redpot86) January 1, 2024
The harshest post the Times cites is Kimberl26890376’s repost of a tweet from a DeSantis supporter in November: “Trump has no loyalty but demands it from everyone else. That’s FEALTY. Which makes sense because these people want a king.”
That’s still mild by Twitter/X standards. Based on Goldmacher and Nehamas’ reporting, as well as the retweets Mediate collected before the account was suspended, Kimberl26890376 seems more like a simple extension of the passive-aggressive approach Reynolds has taken to Trump’s 2024 run, rather than her “unfiltered feelings” about the race.
Reynolds, who displayed an almost abject loyalty to Trump when he was president, has largely refrained from directly criticizing candidate Trump, even when the ex-president attacks her as disloyal. Instead, she has shied away from directly referring to Trump, or even using his name, when making comments that are clearly about him. When she has used Trump’s name, her comments have been even milder than Barbarian Steve’s, with the governor suggesting that Trump was too focused on his 2020 election loss.
It would be interesting to know why Reynolds felt the need to tweet as Kimberl26890376, but so far the governor isn’t answering questions from the Times or from Iowa journalists. And, of course, Reynolds no longer holds regular news conferences.
That the governor of Iowa avoids giving Iowa reporters a chance to question her is a bigger story than Kimberl26890376, but it’s not one likely to interest national media outlets.