Beyond The Base

Donald Trumps coalition is broaderthan the Democrats caricature

- Brian Bennett/Wheeling, W.va. And Justin Worland/Tarkio, Mo.

BLAKE HURST HAS MIXED FEELINGS about his new combine. Sitting 10 feet off the ground in the cab of the half-million-dollar piece of equipment, Hurst proudly points out its cutting-edge bells and whistles, including a GPS monitor that helps track the yield of his farm crops, and remote monitoring that lets him check in on the machinery when members of his family operate it.

But Hurst, dressed in overalls, a red baseball cap and a T-shirt decorated with guns and ammo, believes President Donald Trump has made the harvester a risky investment. Since he bought the machine last fall, Hurst, who farms corn and soybeans, has watched Trump launch a trade war that has hurt the fortunes of farmers like him and changed the outlook for an industry reliant on global markets. More than 70% of farmers say they expect a decline in income of 10% or more next year as a result of the trade tensions, per a Purdue University/CME Group report.

And yet at the Hurst family farm a few miles outside Tarkio, Mo., on this late August day, three generations are sticking with Trump and the Republican Party.

To explain why, Hurst, who also advocates for farmers as the head of the Missouri Farm Bureau, points to the temperature-controlled bins they use for storing unsold crops. He’s thankful Trump nixed the Clean Power Plan, one of President Obama’s most significant climate-change initiatives that could have spiked rural energy prices and driven up the cost of holding their crops for market. He mentions Trump’s impending reversal of the Waters of the U.S. rule, an Obamaera regulation, that farmers feared could have given the federal government authority over the small streams on land in the region. And there are other issues on their mind: infrastructure funding and how the government regulates pesticides, for example.