Donald Trump's support among farmers has generally stayed pretty positive, given all the damage he has inflicted on them. Trump's trade war with China has cinched off a lucrative market that American farmers have worked decades to build, and perhaps not surprisingly, farm bankruptcies have increased so much that Congress passed a bill raising the debt ceiling for them. The Trump administration has also taken other steps to ease the pain, including two aid bills supplying $28 billion in relief.
At first blush, Trump is still pretty popular among farmers. An August survey by the Farm Journal registered 71% support for Trump. But those results posted on August 23 don't tell the whole story, and they also don't include Trump's late-August, 72-hour tailspin, during which he escalated his war with China, de-escalated at the G-7 gathering in France, then escalated again, and finally declared he and China were ready to resume negotiations. It was like nothing anyone has ever witnessed before from a president. Still, even those pre-tailspin numbers show signs of trouble since Trump's support in the Journal's July survey stood at 79 percent, eight points above where they were sitting a month later.
In fact, one Minnesota farmer had a response to a Trump tweet from July declaring farmers were "starting to do great again."
“We’re not starting to do great again,” said Brian Thalmann, president of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, according to the New York Times. Thalmann made the comment in early August at the annual Minnesota Farm Fest. But he followed up with the Times just after Trump's hair-raising G-7 performance, saying that he couldn't support Trump in 2020 as he had in 2016.
“At some point we have to quit playing games and get back to the table and figure this out,” Mr. Thalmann said. “There’s no certainty to any of this.”
The uncertainty is at least part of what's driving some farmers crazy. It makes knowing what to grow and how much to grow a moving target, on top of making getting loans more difficult. And while not all constituents in farm states are farmers, it's worth noting how far Trump's net approval rating has dropped in the some of the farm states that could prove key to the 2020 presidential race and control of the U.S. Senate. The top 10 agricultural producing states in 2017 were: California, Iowa, Texas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Indiana.
Of those, let's check out how Trump's net approval in potential swing states has fared from January 29, 2017, to August 5, 2019. Keep in mind that Iowa, Texas, and North Carolina are all represented by GOP senators that could find themselves in tough re-election bids in 2020.
- Iowa: Trump's net approval down 20 points, 43% approve/54% disapprove
- Texas: Net approval down 14 points, 51% approve/45% disapprove
- Minnesota: Net approval down 17 points, 41% approve/55% disapprove
- North Carolina: Net approval down 19 points, 48% approve, 49% disapprove
- Wisconsin: Net approval down 20 points, 41% approve, 55% disapprove
Trump won every one of those states except Minnesota, and he's underwater in every one of them except Texas.
Perhaps one interesting case study that’s off the beaten path is Nebraska, a Republican stronghold that overwhelmingly favored Trump in 2016, 60% - 34%. His net approval has plunged 24 points since he took office and just crossed over into negative territory, as of Aug. 5.
There's a long way to go between now and November 2020, but if there's one thing we can be assured of, it's that Trump will get more unstable and almost surely wreak more havoc in one financial market or another. Farming in this day and age is an already notoriously fraught endeavor. So when farmers go to the polls in 2020 (if they go), they will have to be asking themselves how much more of Trump's instability they can possibly take.