Born: 6 December 1975, United States
Died: 23 March 2025
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Ludmya Bourdeau
The following is republished from the U.S. Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
In 2014, Mia B. Love won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first African-American Republican woman in Congress and the first Black lawmaker to represent the state of Utah. Love, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, was born in New York and studied theater in Connecticut before moving to Utah, where she entered local politics, eventually serving as mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, during the Great Recession as a proponent of small government. “I wasn’t elected in Saratoga Springs because of my race or my gender or my heels,” she said in 2013 about her time leading the city near Provo, Utah. “I was elected by the people there because I had a plan and a vision to get us financially stable.”
Mia Love was born Ludmya Bourdeau on December 6, 1975, in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents, Jean Maxime and Marie Bourdeau, had fled the hostile regime of Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in late 1974. They did not bring their older children to America, but after Mia was born, the family applied for citizenship and brought her two siblings over from Haiti. The Bourdeaus moved to Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1981, where her mother worked as a nurse and her father took on several jobs to make ends meet. Later during her political career Love recounted her father’s words, “Mia, your mother and I never took a handout. You will not be a burden to society. You will give back.”
Love got involved with the theater while attending Norwalk High School, where she graduated in 1993. She went to the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Connecticut, for its fine arts program and graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1997. While in college, she met her husband Jason Love, a software engineer then on a Latter-day Saints mission. Mia Love converted from Catholicism to the Church of Latter-day Saints and moved to Utah in 1998. The couple has three children: Alessa, Abigail, and Peyton.
Love worked as a flight attendant and call center operator after college, leaving behind her acting plans when she turned down a part in a performance that had been offered the week of her marriage. She soon got involved with local issues and jumped into public service. Love’s first involvement came at the community level, when she led an effort to pressure a local developer to treat lakefront properties in Saratoga Springs for a midge fly infestation. Shortly afterward, in 2003, Love ran for and won a seat on the Saratoga Springs city council. In November 2009, she was elected mayor of Saratoga Springs, taking 59 percent of the vote and becoming the first African-American woman elected mayor in the state of Utah. As mayor, Love, who served during the crippling economic downturn of the Great Recession, kept the municipal government solvent and overcame a budget shortage of $3.5 million.
In late 2011, Love announced her intention to challenge six-term incumbent House Democrat James David “Jim” Matheson in the suburban congressional district that stretched south of Salt Lake City. The district, which had been redrawn following the 2010 Census and had begun to lean more Republican, was home to a burgeoning tech sector, including several medical technology firms and a new data center for the National Security Agency. After easily winning her primary, Love was offered a highprofile speaking slot at the 2012 Republican National Convention where Willard Mitt Romney accepted the party’s nomination for President. Love’s campaign received considerable national attention, but she ultimately fell short of unseating Matheson by a mere 768 votes; Libertarian candidate Jim Vein pulled in 6,439 votes that year.
Love announced in June 2013 that she would seek a rematch with Matheson. “I’m better prepared, I’m a better candidate. Having gone through this, I understand the issues so much better, how campaigns work,” she said. In December, Matheson announced his retirement from Congress, and Democrats nominated Doug Owens, son of former Utah Representative Douglas Wayne Owens. Love downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy and instead focused her campaign’s message on her family’s story and her record as mayor. She opposed the medical device tax, an area of concern for tech companies in her district, and often spoke about the importance of decision-making at the local, rather than the federal, level. Love won the election with 50 percent of the vote to Owens’s 46 percent. During an interview the day after the election, Love said that neither her race nor her gender was a central issue in the campaign. “Principles had everything to do with it.” Love defeated Doug Owens again in the 2016 election with 54 percent of the vote.
During her two terms in the House, Love served on the exclusive House Financial Services Committee, which meant that party rules prevented her from serving on any other standing committees simultaneously. In the 114th Congress (2015–2017), she sat on the Terrorism and Illicit Finance Subcommittee, and in the 115th Congress (2017–2019) she moved to the Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee, and the Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee. From her position on Financial Services, she pushed a bill which raised the lending limit for small banks, which passed as part of a broader Senate bill removing certain financial regulations. Love also served on the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives under the auspices of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
During her two campaigns for the House, Love had been highly critical of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), accusing its members of “demagoguery” and insisting in 2012 she would “take that thing apart from the inside out.” But her rhetoric softened after she joined the caucus. She was the only Black Republican in the CBC during her House service, and regularly attended caucus meetings, including sit downs with Presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump. By 2018, she had developed strong relationships with her colleagues in the caucus, called them mentors, and insisted that “if my leadership asked me to go after a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, I won’t do it.” Love worked alongside fellow CBC members Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri and Karen Bass of California to address poverty and add legal protections for incarcerated pregnant women. In 2018 former CBC chair Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio commended Love for her role in helping shape immigration reform legislation, and defended Love’s work amid criticism from her Democratic opponent that year.
During Love’s two terms in the House, much of Congress’s work revolved around large, last-minute legislative packages and short-term government funding deals. Although she occasionally lobbied to include her individual proposals in these omnibus bills, Love looked to pass legislation by different routes. “I tend to stay to myself—I do these things on my own,” she said. “If I can do things on my own, I know that I can control the message and I can control everything.” Love joined Democrats on certain issues, including the push for bipartisan legislation to reform how Congress handled sexual harassment, which was signed into law just before the end of the 115th Congress. Love added a provision ensuring taxpayers would no longer be liable for settlements paid by congressional offices.
Love supported the Republican Party’s major legislative initiatives during her time in the House: she voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and she backed the passage of the GOP’s replacement legislation, the American Health Care Act of 2017, which passed the House but failed in the Senate. Love fought to delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s medical-device tax by two years, which, she said, would affect several medical technology companies in her district. That proposal ultimately passed as part of the funding deal following a brief government shutdown in January 2018.
Love also drew national attention for her work on behalf of Utah resident Josh Holt, a Latter-day Saints missionary who had been imprisoned in Venezuela on suspicion of weapons charges. In September 2016, Love cosponsored a House Resolution expressing concern about the “ongoing political, economic, social and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela” and urged the release of political prisoners, including Holt. Joining Utah Senators Orrin Grant Hatch and Mike Lee, Love lobbied the Trump administration to secure Holt’s release in May 2018.
During the 2018 midterm elections, Love faced Salt Lake County’s Democratic mayor Ben McAdams. Following a close election and a prolonged count of mail-in ballots, Love conceded the election on November 26, 2018. After leaving the House, Love became a political commentator for a major broadcasting company and served as an elector for the state of Utah in the 2020 Electoral College. In the fall of 2020, Georgetown University appointed Love a fellow at the McCourt School of Public Policy. On March 23, 2025, Love died of brain cancer in Saratoga Springs, Utah.