Michele Marie Bachmann (/ˈbɑːkmən/; née Amble; born April 6, 1956) is an American politician. A member of the Republican Party, she is a former member of the United States House of Representatives, who represented Minnesota's 6th congressional district from 2007 to 2015. The district includes several of the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities, as well as St. Cloud.
Bachmann was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, winning the Ames Straw Poll in August 2011 but dropping out in January 2012 after finishing in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses. She previously served in the Minnesota Senate and is the first Republican woman to represent the state in Congress. She is a supporter of the Tea Party movement and a founder of the House Tea Party Caucus.
Bachmann was born Michele Marie Amble in Waterloo, Iowa, "into a family of Norwegian Lutheran Democrats"; her family moved from Iowa to Minnesota when she was 13 years old. After her parents divorced, Bachmann's father, David John Amble, moved to California, and Bachmann was raised by her mother, Arlene Jean (née Johnson), who worked at the First National Bank in Anoka, Minnesota. Her mother remarried when Bachmann was a teenager; the new marriage resulted in a family with nine children.