The disastrous effects of Donald Trump's plan to kneecap the U.S. Postal Service are dropping like a hammer on rural areas of the country—an effect that none of his henchmen appeared to take into consideration when they started dismantling sorting machines and removing mailboxes, among other things.
The politics for Trump and his Republican enablers heading into November simply cannot be good. Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, a largely rural state, has received 4,800 calls about Postal Service problems since the pandemic began, according to the New York Times.
Montana is host to a U.S. Senate race that unexpectedly became competitive when the state's sitting Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, decided to challenge incumbent GOP Sen. Steve Daines. Bullock and Tester have both seized on the issue while Daines, clearly afraid of poking the Trump bear, has expressed a bare minimum of support for maintaining USPS services. Daines, for instance, declined an interview to the Times on an issue that's prompted nearly 5,000 calls to the offices of his Democratic counterpart. That's stunning.
Meanwhile, Tester told the outlet, “It’s worse than it’s ever been. ... It’s hurting rural America. It makes no sense whatsoever.”
GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine—one of Trump's chief enablers—has practically been placed in a vise grip on the issue, in part, because of the state's blue leanings and her lockstep support for Trump on critical votes. This week, reports surfaced of entire shipments of chicks to rural farmers in the state arriving dead.
While industrial-scale farms often have the resources to transport their own farm animals, smaller mom-and-pop farms and people with backyard hen houses have relied on USPS to deliver their chicks for decades and usually without incident. "We don't have any other options," said Rhiannon Hampson, a Maine poultry farmer who recently lost 3,000 hatchlings in a delayed shipment. “There’s nothing sadder than seeing a box of tiny little fuzzy peeps and all of them are D.O.A.”
The Times reports that many small farms are now dispatching workers to drive hundreds of miles to pick up their chicks straight from the source, but it's a much more expensive and less sustainable option.
And then there's battleground state Ohio, where Trump recently declared war on the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., a major Akron-based provider of some 3,300 jobs in the northeast region of the state. That hasn't played well with the plant's local union. But on the western side of the state, farmers like Chris Gibbs aren't happy either, particularly with the Trump administration's assault on once-reliable postal services.
“This is an attack on a tried-and-true service that rural America depends on,” said Gibbs, who voted for Trump in 2016 but has since launched an advocacy group decrying the toll Trump's policies have taken on rural Americans. “It pulls one more piece of stability, predictability and reliability from rural America. People don’t like that.”
The abrupt policy changes at the agency have wreaked havoc on everything from plant shipments to replacement parts for farm machines to prescription drug refills. And since most rural areas lack reliable internet services, tracking down late and/or lost shipments can be an hours-long labor intensive process.
Jenks Farmer of Beech Island, S.C., relies on USPS to ship two-pound lily bulbs all across the country and has been seeing delivery delays of up to a week. “My business isn’t political, but it depends on the economy and political leadership,” Farmer said. “I don’t have a leader who’s doing anything to help my businesses thrive.”
Though a recent survey of rural voters shows that many of their views on USPS, who's responsible for the slowdowns, and other issues are colored by partisan leanings, 57% of these likely rural voters said they would be less likely to support a candidate who reduced the budget for the Postal Service or privatized it, including 43% of Republicans. The party breakdown of the survey also skewed heavily conservative, with 56% Republican-identified respondents versus 34% who identified as Democrats.
That finding is exactly why Democrats will continue pounding the issue home, on top of the fact that Trump is clearly trying to rob Americans of a free and fair election by suppressing mail voting. Senate Democrats grilled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Friday during a congressional hearing, and House Democrats will also press DeJoy during an oversight hearing Monday.
