She’s been compared with Marco Rubio and called “the next big thing in conservative politics.” Meet Mia Love, a wife, mother, mayor and runner who is, er, running for Congress in Utah’s newly-created fourth congressional district. Here, she introduces herself in a video that makes it easy to see why she’s attracted such positive attention among conservatives and why elaborate praise of her does not appear to be overblown:

In fact, she sounds almost too good to be true. To be sure, she’s still a long-shot candidate, even in a district that has no incumbent. She first faces two other Republicans — and, if she earns the GOP nomination, she’ll square off against Democratic Congressman Jim Matheson, whose current constituency has been carved into four pieces by redistricting. Right now, she polls slightly behind the other would-be GOP nominees — but that appears to be largely an issue of name recognition. Matheson leads all of them.

But as she says in her video, “difficult things aren’t easy, but they’re worth it.” As a runner, she’s willing to tackle the hills; I doubt she’s daunted by the difficult campaign ahead. If she does manage to pull off an upset, she’ll be the first female black Republican in the House and Utah’s first black representative. She’d join the Congressional Black Caucus, she says — to “try to take that thing apart from the inside out.” (She already has a history of standing up to the demagoguery that runs rampant among members of the CBC. See this guest column she wrote for The Daily Caller.)

Mia Love is a magnificent reminder that congressional elections are equally as important as the presidential election. To achieve meaningful legislative reforms like the repeal of Obamacare, Republicans must retain the House and take back the Senate, as well as win the White House. Not just any ol’ Republicans will do, though. As we saw this summer during the debt ceiling debate, as long as conservatives are in the minority among Republicans, government will continue to grow. Meaningful entitlement reform and real spending cuts — among other accomplishments — hinge on the election of committed candidates like Mia Love.