American farmers, among Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters, face mounting financial pain from the president’s trade war with China and the growing risk that the damage will outlast the conflict. The standoff with China over trade is compounding the strain of five years of falling commodity prices and losses from spring flooding. And as the dispute drags on, China is forging relationships with competing suppliers, and farmers in other countries are reorienting operations to cater to the Chinese markets.
Among the hardest hit and most vulnerable to continuing tensions are soybean growers across the U.S. grain belt. Soybean futures on Monday skidded to their lowest prices in more than a decade and are down more than 20% from a year ago.
That is a direct blow to Trump country. In the the 2016 election, Trump carried eight of the 10 states with the largest soybean production, all of them in the Midwest. Iowa, the country’s second-largest soybean producer after Illinois, swung from Democrat to Republican in 2016 and easily could swing back again.
Some agricultural leaders harshly criticized the latest escalation, though farm groups mostly have been wary of blaming Trump directly because of his popularity in rural America.
“Washington, D.C., has made another miscalculation, and the livelihoods of farmers and the communities they support is threatened,” Lynn Rohrscheib, president of the Illinois Soybean Growers, which represents 43,000 farmers in the state, said in a statement Monday. “Illinois soybean producers face greater challenges each day without a deal. We see no end in sight.”
The sense of peril was evident in the president’s announcement Friday in tandem with new tariffs on China of an ill-defined plan to help farmers with $15 billion in assistance that would come on top of the $12 billion in aid announced last year. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said he is working on a plan and will submit it to the president within “a few days to a couple of weeks.”
Trump offered assurances in a tweet Tuesday that “Our great Patriot Farmers will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of what is happening now.”
Republicans from farm country warned that patience is waning, even as they avoided criticism of the president.
“I’d say the farm community is right on the edge of having been as supportive as they can be before that begins to turn,” GOP Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, said. “But hopefully the president will come to some conclusion here soon.”
“It’s going to have some impact on elections, of course,” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. “But I think people all realize that China is just cheating.” He said, “We’ve got to compliment the president for doing something.”
Farmers aren’t likely to turn wholesale against Trump any time soon. “There could be some erosion of Trump’s support in the rural base of the electorate,” but for the most part they will “stick with Trump,” said Mack Shelley, a political science professor at Iowa State University.
Yet even a modest shift to Democrats or a loss of enthusiasm among his supporters could be consequential in the next election. Trump dominated rural America with a 28 percentage point advantage over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 yet lost the popular vote. He only won the Electoral College by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania through a combined margin of less than 80,000 votes.
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