Ten days ahead of the midterm elections that will help decide his legacy, President Trump will tout his agricultural record to a pared-down crowd of 7,000 teenagers at the FFA national convention in Indianapolis and campaign in southern Illinois for an imperiled Republican member of the House Agriculture Committee. The events on Saturday would be the president’s splashiest trip to farm country since he crowed about year-round E15 sales at a campaign rally for Iowa Republicans on Oct. 9.
Trump will be speaking as much to farmers as to FFA members on Saturday afternoon. Commodity prices are down sharply because of the trade war that began in midsummer. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue says the trilateral agreement on the new NAFTA vindicates Trump’s tactics of trade confrontation and that the same approach will yield results in forthcoming negotiations with Japan, Britain, and the European Union. Trump has demurred on negotiations with China, the No. 1 customer for U.S. farm exports until tit-for-tat tariffs disrupted trade.
“People feel confident the president knows what he’s doing” on trade, said Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, during a teleconference earlier this week, although it will be months or even years before new trade agreements would take effect. “It reinforces the fact that they’re going to stick with the president.”
Trump won the rural vote by a landslide in 2016 with his promises of tax cuts, regulatory relief, and support for corn ethanol. He remains highly popular in rural America, although his support has ebbed a bit among farmers, according to polls by farm magazines. There is sympathy in rural areas for the administration’s argument that the short-term pain of the trade war will be offset by the long-term improvement in trade rules, especially with China.
All the same, farmer confidence is at its lowest since October 2016, just before Trump was elected, according to the Ag Economy Barometer run by Purdue University. Half of the farmers polled by Purdue in September said they expect their net income to fall by at least 10 percent this year because of the trade war. Farm groups have pressed quietly for the removal of steel and aluminum tariffs that resulted in retaliatory barriers to ag sales to Canada and Mexico. The groups also pushed for quicker action on new bilateral agreements.
To assuage Farm Belt anxiety, Trump announced on Oct. 9 that the administration will allow the year-round sale of E15, a richer biofuel blend than the traditional 10-percent mixture of ethanol into gasoline. The EPA says it will begin work on the regulation in February and complete it in May, just before the usual June 1 cutoff for summertime E15 sales. “That is a very short window … [that] doesn’t give EPA a lot of wiggle room to get this done,” said Geoff Cooper of the Renewable Fuels Association on Thursday. Environmentalists and the oil industry have threatened a lawsuit to block the sales as soon as the EPA finalizes the rule, raising doubts about whether E15 will be available for the 2019 summer driving season.
The president’s trip to Indiana may help Republican Mike Braun, the businessman challenging Sen. Joe Donnelly, a Democratic member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Analysts rate the race as a toss-up in a state that leans Republican. Trump campaigned for Braun in Evansville, in southern Indiana, on Aug. 30. Donnelly played a key role in GMO food-labeling legislation.
After the speech in Indianapolis, Trump will hold an airport rally for second-term Rep. Mike Bost in Murphysboro, in a part of southern Illinois known as “Little Egypt” because it has towns named Cairo and Thebes and fertile bottomland along one of the world’s great rivers. Bost is challenged by Brendan Kelly, a Democrat and the elected state’s attorney in St. Clair County, the population center of the 12th House District and across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.
Bost “appears to be holding off a strong Democratic recruit [Kelly], and he also benefits from the presence of a Green Party candidate,” which is splitting anti-Bost vote, said the political news site Sabato’s Crystal Ball. On Thursday, it changed its rating of the race to “Leans Republican” from the previous “Toss-up.”
Some 65,000 people, most of them student members of the FFA, attend the group’s national convention, held annually in Indianapolis. Only 7,000 of them will see Trump in person. Tickets were distributed on a first-come, first-served basis to convention attendees on Thursday.
In July 2017, Trump spoke to thousands of teenagers at the National Scout Jamboree, where he broke 80 years of precedent of nonpartisanship by delivering a politicized speech that praised his record, attacked Democrats, and included an anecdote about a cocktail party and a threat to fire a cabinet member if Congress didn’t pass a healthcare bill.