President Donald Trump's chaotic handling of the economy is testing the loyalty of one of the GOP's most reliable voting blocs: farmers, according to The Washington Sun.
Ryan Marquardt, vice president of the Iowa Farmers Union, was working a booth at the Iowa State Fair when word broke that the U.S. would import hundreds of thousands of tons of below-market-priced beef from Argentina and Brazil. The reaction was instant. "I've never seen farmers more p---ed," Marquardt told the Sun. "That was the maddest I've seen farmers in a long time."
The decision was one of several actions by the Trump administration that experts and insiders say have dulled enthusiasm for Republicans among rural voters, who are already facing high input costs from the war in Iran and escalating trade wars with some of the country’s biggest buyers of American agriculture," the Sun reported on Monday.
Some conservatives insist the Democratic brand "is too poor to rehabilitate in many areas" for any of this to matter electorally. But William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, isn't so sure.
"A lot of people who are now being called 'reliable Republican voters' weren't within living memory," he told the Sun before elaborating, “It takes something big to change long-established voting patterns, but I think there’s a possibility that the Trump administration has done things that are big enough and bad enough from the standpoint of rural America to make some of the voters who shifted a decade ago reconsider their choice."
The fallout is already rattling the GOP's midterm math. One senator has warned Trump is in "serious trouble in farm country," with Iowa and other farm states now seen as genuinely competitive. Meanwhile, Democratic challengers are seizing on the backlash to paint vulnerable Republicans as too scared to stand up to Trump.