She’s breaking through on her own, rising this year to become the Senate’s No. 4 Republican and only the second woman in chamber history to chair the GOP policy committee. For a party struggling to grow its reach in presidential elections as well as with suburban women, it’s a meaningful elevation of a woman in leadership. And now Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) is right behind Ernst at No. 5.

Ernst is in line to chair the Senate Republican Conference come 2025, due to term limits on the leaders above her. The only other woman to rise that high: former Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine … 50 years ago.

She said she would consider seeking the No. 3 role, for which Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said she’s a lock: “Without a doubt.” If she wins reelection in 2026 and maintains support in the conference, she could be the first female GOP whip in congressional history.

Her current job involves legislative strategy and the stewardship of weekly party lunches. That’s tougher than it sounds: She oversees a 49-member conference with plenty of different ideas about how to run things and enough frustrated conservatives to spark a challenge to Mitch McConnell’s leadership late last year.

As for her personal style, her Iowa-appropriate corny humor often comes through on the Senate floor in gags like a “Price is Up” game show wheel or an Internet Uno meme. That patter isn’t typical in staid Washington, but Ernst says it’s part of how she tries to reach young people, suburban women and, yes, biker dudes.

“We really need to go where we’re not. And I can go where we’re not,” she explained.

Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) put it another way: Ernst “is particularly effective with demographic groups that sometimes a bunch of us middle-aged white guys have a hard time connecting with.”

All of that will be tested over the next 12 months. Ernst is in a tricky spot as a rising Republican leader from an early-voting state who is focused on broadening the party’s tent. She’s staying neutral in the presidential contest and vowing to support the eventual GOP nominee, which means not joining Thune in support of Scott.

When it comes to the biggest question hanging over the primary, however, she forcefully rebuts the notion that Trump owns the GOP: “Our party is so much more than Donald Trump. Our party is the party of Tim Scott and Joni Ernst and John Thune and Marsha Blackburn. And we have got a breadth of ideas and a positive outlook.”

And when she talks about the new day she wants to see in the GOP, her vision doesn’t exactly sound like another Trump presidency.

“We need to look forward,” she said. “You have to have a candidate that will speak about and inspire people to be engaged and involved and talk about the goodness of America and how we bring people together, not: ‘How do we divide us.’”

Ernst’s raised some eyebrows with her voting record, despite the frequent partisan rhetoric required of a party leader. She did not support last Congress’ bipartisan infrastructure law but took the minority position in her party to back a Biden-era gun safety law and same-sex marriage protections.

Those votes made her life harder with conservative voters as she travels the state’s 99 counties each year.

“If the bill had been titled ‘conservative religious liberties bill,’ and it’s the same text. Republicans would have been: ‘Good on you, Joni,’” she said of the same-sex marriage bill.

And when it comes to her gun vote, she said: “I’ve asked people in Iowa, how many of you are now denied the right to obtain a weapon? What weapons did we take out of the system?” The answer is often crickets, she said.

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