- “In Iowa, we should prepare to lose everything, certainly the governor’s race and maybe the Senate race and who knows what else,” said a Republican campaign consultant working in Iowa and other states.
Driving the news: As his political operation watches Iowa with concern, Trump held a White House news conference Monday to announce plans to build a massive steel plant in the state that would be the largest in the nation.
- Iowa politicians note that the $15 billion plant won’t be operational until 2030, too late to bring tangible relief to people suffering now.
Zoom: Farming in Iowa has been tough for years due to rising costs, consolidation trends and foreign competition. But farmers say two recent stressors are directly linked to Trump:
- Prices increasing costs of fertilizers, pesticides and agricultural equipment, and caused market instability. The resulting trade wars are particularly damaging to relations between the United States and Canada, which buys about 30 percent of Iowa’s exports.
- The war in Iran increased the cost of diesel by nearly 80 percent in Iowa, forcing farmers to bleed money, consider taking out loans just to survive and limiting machine usage to critical levels.
The big picture: “Iowa is at the beginning of an agricultural crisis. It’s ground zero,” the consultant said. “But it’s in the corn belt and it’s showing signs of spreading into Kansas and Nebraska and even Missouri.”
- Polls show closer-than-expected races in the Kansas Senate race and the Nebraska gubernatorial campaign.
- Trump won Iowa by more than 13 percentage points in 2024. But in the current U.S. Senate race, Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson is essentially tied in polling averages with Democratic Rep. Josh Turek.
- In the Iowa gubernatorial race, Auditor Rob Sand, a Democrat, is leading Republican candidate Zach Lahn by larger margins.
Between the lines: Mark Mueller, a Republican voter and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, said he doesn’t think the GOP’s problem is “disastrous” because the polls could be wrong.
- “People are just embarrassed to tell pollsters that they voted for Trump,” Mueller said, pointing out that “Hinson and Lanh didn’t get the president here, and Hinson is touting her independence” from Trump now as she calls for an end to the war in Iran, which she once supported.
- Hinson, however, was with Trump in the Oval Office on Monday, absorbing the president’s praise.
Mueller said his farm in Waverly, Iowa, it’s “getting by,” but that “I easily see more farmers going bankrupt or retiring. It hurts the young people. They have a harder time getting in. It hurts the little ones.”
- Interest rates are rising – a further blow to farmers like him who finance much of their operations by taking out loans that they repay after selling their crops.
- “Some say they can’t even leave the family farm to their son,” he said. “It won’t be like the crisis of the 1980s. But the situation is getting worse.”
The plot: The Iowa Republican Party considers farm country Republican, but few expect those voters to suddenly side with Democrats.
- Republicans’ worry — and Democrats’ hope — is that many of these Republican voters will stay home on Election Day.
- Julius Shaaf, a Democrat who is a retired corn and soybean farmer in Freemont County, said he is skeptical that many of Iowa’s established farmers will stop voting for Republicans. But young farmers without a safety net face more difficulty dealing with volatility, he said.
- “It completely eliminates them,” Schaaf said. “It’s almost impossible for them to continue like this.”
Meanwhile, Hinson’s supporters fear being dragged down by Lahn, who has been dogged by critical coverage in liberal media questioning his Iowa residency and agricultural background.
- “Ashley can survive. I wouldn’t bet on Lahn,” said an Iowa Republican.
What they say: Hinson’s campaign touted her ties to agriculture and her support with farm groups, predicting she would win.
- Lahn’s campaign says voter registration trends and Iowa’s conservative culture will prevail.
- “Anytime you have three front-line seats in the House, a front-line seat in the Senate and an open gubernatorial race in the midterms, you’re going to have to fight for that,” said Lahn’s top adviser, Luke Thompson.
- “It’s going to be tough,” he said. “But shitting pants is stupid.”
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