Here we are in August 2026, coming up on one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s history and one key question is what will happen with the vote in rural America, especially farmers. This bloc has voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the last three Nationwide elections and is certainly favored to vote primarily Republican again in the mid terms. The question I want to ask is why?
Don’t get me wrong, Democrats have ignored the rural vote for many, many years, becoming increasingly tied to college educated urban populations, but that really shouldn’t be the question. The real question is- why continue to vote for a party (Republican) and a President by association (Trump) that continues to screw you over? Forget the emotion or the culture war aspects, forget the utter nonsense being spewed by the President re “communists” (he clearly doesn’t understand the definition of communism, and constantly touts what good buddies he is with the three leading communist regimes in the world- Russia, China and North Korea) and look at the cold. hard economic facts.
Trump has consistently ruined the foreign market for American farm crops, especially soybeans, through his idiotic and random tariff/trade wars. China has increasingly moved to buying soybeans from Argentina and Brazil, leaving U.S farmers holding the bag. Any markets for American crops in our long standing ally and neighbor Canada have been destroyed, like for the liquor industry. Those same tariffs have driven up the cost of fertilizer to the point that many farmers can’t afford it or aren’t using it. Diesel prices aren’t just up a “tiny little bit” like the President says, they are up 30-40% from a year ago, because of an ill-advised and unsuccessful war with Iran, one we really aren’t winning and have no exit strategy for. Electricity rates are going up everywhere, sometimes by double digits due to use of high cost fossil fuels, ignoring the broken grid infrastructure, promoting uncontrolled growth of data centers and impeding the use of lower cost electric generation on sheerly emotional, archaic thinking grounds. Interest rates have slowly started to migrate upwards due to the enormous national debt and the increasing demand of the tech industry for capital. Mortgage rates aren’t really coming down anytime soon and interest costs are killing farmers. Your seasonal labor supply has been devastated by an incoherent, wildly discriminatory immigration policy that ignores any reality associated with hard or low paying labor needs that American youth simply won’t do.
Meanwhile, you can ignore climate change all you want, but the reality is that the effects of it are being felt directly by farmers across the U.S. Whether it is record droughts, catastrophic flooding, movement of the historic tornado belt to the heartland of Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana it is real. The Trump administration energy policies are aggravating this by expediting the use of fossil fuels and attempting to eliminate renewable energy like wind and solar from the mix. Insect pests are attacking both farms and ranches partially due to the severe cutbacks in the federal agencies responsible for monitoring and responding to outbreaks.
So what do Republicans do? Make dramatic speeches at state fairs, throw handouts to farmers that cover at best 20-40% of their financial losses every year or two and then assume farmers are too dumb to see the truth and will vote for them anyways. Meanwhile the people they really care about? Tech billionaires and big business like agribusinesses with ridiculous tax cuts, absurdly low tax rates and write-offs, wildly favorable incentives for building things that no one wants. Next up? A capital gains tax break for the very rich. Unless you are selling your farm, getting out of the business for good, how does this help the American farmer.
No I don’t think the Democrats have all the answers. Do they understand rural America? No, but here is one thing you can say. They don’t hate farmers, rural Americans or people on Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. They care. You can make them listen to you, whereas the Republicans listen to no one but Trump. They certainly don’t relate to the working class no matter how much they trumpet it. Do Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos strike you as working class?
There are answers to our farm issues that could very much empower family farms at the expense of agribusiness and make farming the rewarding and valued occupation it has historically been in America. It will be a slow transition, not a quick fix, because it means changing our focus from highly chemical dependent crops going to the export market to growing biofuel crops to provide transportation fuel. Encouraging the production of fruits and vegetables for local markets instead of importing lettuce or avocados from Mexico with the associated risks to the food safety chain. Moving to sustainable farming practices before all the top soil is gone and every lake or river around farming areas is contaminated with agricultural or livestock runoff. Sure it may be less productive, but the real question is economics. If you don’t need all the chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, and if fuel costs become stable instead of varying wildly based on the world market price, what does the bottom line look like? You say where is the money going to come from for that transition? Maybe we should spend crop support money on long term changes to agriculture instead of immediate relief. We have plenty of money to build monuments to egomaniacs, why not money to change farming?
Everyone has heard the classic definition of insanity. Keep doing the same old thing again and again and expecting a different, better result. You’ve done that for the last how ever many years, certainly the last 10 in support of Trump for a result that is destroying all of you. What do you have to lose by trying something different? You can make Democrats and Independents listen to you, Republicans simply don’t care about anyone but the rich, so they aren’t listening ever. It’s your choice. Don’t whine about your situation unless you have the guts to do something about it.