THE Democratic Party will do well to pay attention to the history lesson provided by Mother Jones, Michael Pollan, Jake Davis, and Art Cullen in this article if they actually plan on running a candidate to win the presidency as well as maintain control of the U.S. House and win control of the U.S. Senate. CHECK OUT this 31 AUGUST 2016 Mother Jones article 'Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers' at the end of this post.....
Clinton Gave Up on Rural America. Are the Democrats About to Do It Again?
The next Democratic candidate doesn’t need to devote massive resources to farm counties with the goal of beating Trump in rural America. But completely ignoring these regions would be foolish.
Even if they can’t win farm country, ignoring it would be foolish.
President Donald Trump, speaking in Iowa last week, made a bold prediction about his prospects in the Hawkeye State this coming November: “We’re going to win the great state of Iowa, and it’s going to be a historic landslide,” he thundered.
Trump may actually turn out to be right this time (though probably not about the victory margin). Democratic Party decision-makers have decided that the 2020 nominee can’t compete with Trump for rural votes, as recent pieces by veteran Politico and Washington Post reporters laid out.”A new sentiment has echoed throughout recent conversations with Democratic strategists, activists and campaigns, a consensus that would have been unthinkable just eight years ago: Iowa is no longer a battleground,” Politico‘s Tim Alberta reported. “Not in 2020, anyway.” Iowa is a relatively rural state, and the Dems feel like there’s a bigger payoff to be found in more metropolitan-heavy regions, the articles report.
If the Democratic candidates do fly over farm country, they would be following the lead of Hillary Clinton in 2016. During that year’s general election, Clinton basically wrote off the rural vote. Months before the Iowa caucus, she alighted on Ankeny, a small town outside of Des Moines, to release a vague rural policy plan. After narrowly defeating Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa, she trained her gaze to more population-dense regions, essentially ignoring rural-dominated counties. The reasoning was simple. In a fiercely contested national campaign, time and resources have to be allocated carefully, and rural areas tilt conservative and have been draining population for decades, while cities and suburbs grow.
The Clinton campaign’s decision ended up benefiting Donald Trump, who ran a much more prominent rural operation. Clinton not only lost Iowa by nearly 10 percentage points in the general election—a state Barack Obama handily won twice—but she narrowly surrendered the much larger farm-heavy states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where her strong advantage in metropolitan regions was trumped by her rural collapse. “Hillary lost rural America 3 to 1,” a Democratic insider told Politico. “If she had lost rural America 2 to 1, it would have broken differently.”
There’s much more at stake than Iowa’s six electoral votes. Back in 2008, Barack Obama campaigned hard in farm country during the general election and won 45 percent of the rural vote, helping him paint Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Michigan (16), and Wisconsin (10) blue. He clung to those states in 2012, even though his rural support slipped to 39 percent. In 2016, Clinton learned the hard way that dipping much below that level can be disastrous, says Jake Davis, policy director for Family Farm Action, a political advocacy group. She grabbed just 34 percent of the rural vote, and what had been a blue wall in the eastern farm belt—stretching from Iowa to Pennsylvania—came tumbling down.
The next Democratic candidate doesn’t need to devote massive resources to farm counties with the goal of beating Trump in rural America, Davis said. But completely ignoring these regions would be foolish. The nominee “has to show up,” he said. “Make some campaign stops, talk about [rural people’s] issues, listen to their issues, and there’s 10 percent of voters out there who feel like they’re disenfranchised from both parties,” he said. “It’s there for the taking, and it’s clear President Trump isn’t taking care of rural areas,” he added, referring to the administration’s export-roiling trade machinations, its policies favoring big meat packers over independent farmers, and its approvals of mega-mergers among seed/agrichemical conglomerates.
In contrast, this year’s Democratic contenders—especially senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—have actually released bold rural/farm policies, which I’ve summarized here. They promise to crack down on the seed, pesticide, and meat-packing corporations that dominate farm country, and pledge to enlist farmers in the fight against climate change by paying them to store carbon in the soil.
At a forum in California last week—which you can catch on the latest episode of Bite podcast—Art Cullen, the Pulitzer-winning editor of the small-town Storm Lake Times in rural northwest Iowa, sounded similar themes. Clinton lost the Midwestern farm belt because “she never showed up,” Cullen said. “The first rule of politics is to ask people for their vote. She never asked the Midwest for their votes.”
Over the past several months, as Democratic presidential candidates have barnstormed the vast rural stretches of the state, hoping to generate momentum by showing well in the Feb. 3 Iowa caucus, their vows to break up the agribusiness oligopolies and pay farmers for climate-ready agriculture have drawn cheers, Cullen said. Their message was well-timed: A long slump in crop prices persists, farm bankruptcies keep climbing, and another round of massive spring storms in 2019 put Trump’s climate-change denialism in an unflattering light.
Asked if Trump could triumph in the region again, Cullen was incredulous. Farmers “are fed up, and for the life of me, I’ll eat your left shoe if Iowa goes to Trump again,” Cullen said. Perhaps those Democratic strategists should think twice before writing off farm country.
Using dirt to fight climate change: It's all the rage in the primary. (Mother Jones)
Trump claimed he's weaning people off food stamps. Actually, he's kicking them off. (Mother Jones)
He also rescued a nasty pesticide from an EPA ban. Now Corteva will stop making it. (Mother Jones)
Trophy hunters can bid for a chance to kill deer with "accomplished conservationist" Donald Trump Jr. He accidentally shot an endangered species in Mongolia last summer. (Mother Jones)
Pinning the coronavirus on eating habits reignites racist assumptions about Chinese people. "Fearmongering and callously using rhetoric that suggests that Chinese people...deserve this outbreak as some kind of payback for 'barbarian' customs is, at its core, blatant prejudice." (Eater)
NEW FROM BITE PODCAST
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There's a new power broker in national politics, but it's not a politician. Art Cullen, editor of the tiny Iowa newspaper the Storm Lake Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his op-eds on Big Ag meddling in local communities. Now, presidential candidates make sure to visit him while on the campaign trail. Ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Cullen talked to legendary food writer Michael Pollan about rural economics, climate change, and the presidential election.
Hear it on Bite, episode 101: "Michael Pollan on the Iowa Farmers Who Will Sway the Election"
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Food for Thought comes to you from Mother Jones, an award-winning, investigative journalism outlet that was founded as a nonprofit magazine in 1976.
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Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers
At a big speech in Iowa, he swore to roll back clean-water regulation and to continue propping up the ethanol boondoggle.
#TBT to that one time when Donald Trump joined actress Megan Mullally in a duet of the "Green Acres" theme song at the 2006 Emmys. Mark J. Terrill/AP Photo
Like a jittery upstart on The Apprentice, Donald Trump is looking like an unlikely contender for the prize he’s groping for. To beat the long odds stacked against him in the presidential election, the mercurial reality TV star will have to conquer a chunk of real estate quite distinct from the vast gambling dens and condo castles he’s used to: Iowa.
While the US corn, soybean, and hog capital isn’t a big enough prize on its own to push the GOP nominee to victory, “there is no realistic path to the presidency for Trump without Iowa’s six electoral votes,” as the Washington Post recently reported. Ohio, too, has emerged as a necessary but insufficient piece of the electoral map for Trump.
So the lifelong urbanite is plunging those famous fingers of his into the muck of farm-state politics. Trump reportedly declined to mount a Harley and participate in the ride portion of Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” event at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines last week, but he did deliver a red-meat speech pandering to some of the baser urges of the Corn Belt’s agribusiness interests.
Here are some highlights:
• He thundered against government regulation of farming practices—a highly contentious topic in a state where waterways and drinking water are routinely polluted by runoff from farms. “We are going to end the EPA intrusion into your family homes and into your family farms, for no reason—what they’re doing to you is a disgrace,” he declared, adding without citing evidence the unlikely claim that “many” Iowans have lost their farms to overzealous enforcement of environmental standards.
Hillary Clinton “wants to shut down family farms,” Trump proclaimed.
• To the crowd’s delight, Trump vowed to revoke the Obama administration’s Waters of the US Rule, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency greater authority to regulate water pollution. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, “wants to shut down family farms just like she wants to shut down the miners and the steelworkers… through radical regulation,” he warned.
• Yet Trump pledged support for an infamous federal government boondoggle: a 2007 law that mandates that a huge portion of the US corn crop be diverted into ethanol production. “President Obama lied to you about his support for the Renewable Fuel Standard, and you can trust Hillary Clinton even less,” he said. In reality, Obama has never wavered in his support for the corn-ethanol mandate, and Clinton, too, supports it—as does one of her main ag policy advisers, USDA chief Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa.
• Trump promised to “end double taxation of family farms at death”—a reference to the estate tax. Repealing the so-called death tax is a perennial applause line for GOP politicians, and Trump’s proclamation drew an enthusiastic response. It’s hard to figure out why the issue still resonates with farm audiences—after years of rollbacks, the tax now applies only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher, and affects fewer than 1 percent of US family-owned farm operations, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
On two other issues, Trump declined to pander to the ag crowd during his Iowa speech. On immigration, the candidate has maneuvered himself into a tight corner. Anti-migrant rants fueled Trump’s blitz through the primaries, appealing to the nativist impulses of the GOP base. But Big Ag relies heavily on immigrants for labor, from the fruit and vegetable fields of California and Florida to Iowa’s industrial-scale hog slaughterhouses. Perhaps in deference to such business interests, Trump has on some recent occasions softened his stance on immigration. Underlining these tensions, several members of Trumps 64-person ag policy committee support a much softer stance on migration, the Washington Post recently reported. But in his Iowa speech, Trump for some reason reverted to old ways, fulminating against “criminal illegal immigrants” and vowing yet again to “build a great border wall.”
The other issue is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade deal championed by President Barack Obama and prized by Big Ag because it pries open Asian markets for US-grown seeds, grain, and meat. Trump has been denouncing the TPP on nativist grounds since he launched his campaign. Perhaps because Iowa stands second only to California in agricultural exports, Trump held his tongue on the TPP during his speech, declining to mention trade at all.
Perhaps to smooth over those immigration and trade rough spots with the Big Ag community, the Trump campaign deployed the chairman of its Rural Advisory Committee, Charles Herbster, to address the Ohio Cattlemen’s Association’s annual roundup in Jackson, Ohio, last Saturday. Herbster, a Nebraska rancher and multilevel-marketing magnate, did not return calls asking for details of his presentation. According to Elizabeth Harsh, executive director of the OCA, Herbster “answered many questions from OCA members,” ranging from “trade and TPP to health care and immigration.” She added, “OCA’s members were very interested and engaged in the discussion,” but she declined to say more.
In a brief interview a month ago, Herbster acknowledged that he’d been getting calls from farmers concerned about Trump’s crusade against the TPP, and insisted that a President Trump would renegotiate trade deals in a way that keeps ag exports booming.
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