SPOKANE, Wash. — Gary Bailey is certain China is trying to rattle Donald Trump voters with its threat to slap tariffs on soybeans and other agriculture staples grown in rural America. The wheat farmer in eastern Washington, a state that exports $4 billion a year in farm products, is also certain of the result.
“It’s a strategy that’s working,” he said.
If farmers are worried, so are Republican politicians, who depended on small-town America to hand them control of Congress and know how quickly those voters could take it away. Just seven months before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s faceoff with China over trade has exposed an unexpected political vulnerability in what was supposed to be the Republican Party’s strongest region: rural America.
They are regions in which the GOP’s quest to retain its House and Senate majorities this fall is tied directly to Republican voters’ views about their pocketbooks and Trump’s job performance.
Trump says he’s simply fighting against unfair business practices with a geopolitical rival.
After the Trump administration announced plans to impose tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports Tuesday, China lashed back within hours, matching the American tariffs with plans to tax $50 billion of U.S. products, including soybeans, corn and wheat.
Trump escalated the standoff further on Thursday by asking the U.S. trade representative to consider $100 billion in additional tariffs against China, which had previously released plans to impose retaliatory tariffs on frozen pork, nuts and wine in response to Trump’s intent to apply duties to imported aluminum and steel.
The soybean industry, perhaps more than any other, illustrates the potential harm to Republican candidates in the fall.
Soy production is concentrated in the Midwest. Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Indiana and Missouri account for over half of all soy produced in the United States. And more than 60 percent of U.S. soy exports have been sent to mainland China in recent years.
Trump won 89 percent of America’s counties that produce soy, according to an Associated Press analysis of Agriculture Department and election data. In those counties, on average, two out of three voters supported Trump in 2016.
Many Republican candidates who represent rural areas Trump won in 2016 are being forced to choose between his trade policies and community interests. Vulnerable Republicans are walking a tightrope.
Overall, an estimated 2.1 million jobs could be affected by the trade dispute nationally, with a majority coming from counties that Trump won, according to an analysis by Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program.
“We’re in kind of a farm crisis,” said Bob Worth, who grows soybeans, corn and spring wheat with his son on 2,200 acres (3.4 square miles) near Lake Benton in southwestern Minnesota. He wouldn’t say how he voted in 2016, but he offered kind, if measured, words for Trump.
“I’m going to believe in the man,” added Worth, who’s also on the board of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association. “He’s doing this for business reasons only. I don’t know if he knows how much he’s hurting agriculture.”