Farmers Are Footing Trump's Bill. The GOP Can't Hide It Anymore.

Combines are rolling through Kansas wheat and corn country this month, but harvest season has brought little relief to the farmers running them. Diesel is down from its record September high, but it's still running far above where it stood a year ago — a spike NPR reported hit an all-time national record in late September and that has stayed elevated into October, squeezing growers at the exact moment they most need fuel to run equipment and haul crops to town.

Glenn Brunkow, a fifth-generation Kansas farmer and president of the Kansas Farm Bureau, put it simply: "It seems like it's coming at us from all directions."

He's not exaggerating. The USDA's own September forecast projects net farm income will slip about 2.6% this year — closer to 5.5% once inflation is factored in — even as production costs climb an estimated 4.5%, with fuel and oil expenses alone jumping nearly 30%. Farmers are getting squeezed from both ends: higher costs to grow the crop, and shrinking overseas markets as other countries retaliate against the administration's tariffs.

The timing could not be worse for Republicans. President Trump is visiting Kansas this week and Iowa later on, part of a late-campaign push to energize his base in farm country before the midterms. But the frustration he's walking into runs deeper than fuel prices.

Don Hineman, a western Kansas rancher and former Republican state House majority leader, says the discontent now extends well beyond agriculture — fed by tariff damage, the ongoing war with Iran, and immigration raids that recently swept up more than 100 people in western Kansas. He's not against border enforcement, he says, but he's frustrated that it's outpacing any real fix to the immigration policy farmers actually depend on for labor.

Debbie Geneva, a lifelong Kansas Republican who says she has never once voted for a Democrat, is now undecided in the state's marquee Senate race, citing healthcare costs and trade policy as reasons she's taking a second look at Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton.

That shift is showing up in the polling. A new Emerson College/Nexstar survey has Hamilton leading incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall 45% to 43% — a startling number in a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2024, and where Democrats haven't won a Senate seat in nearly a century. Cook Political Report has already moved the race off "solid Republican."

Kansas isn't an outlier. In Nebraska, national Republicans have funneled nearly $15 million into defending Sen. Pete Ricketts against independent challenger Dan Osborn — including a late $1.4 million outside ad buy in September — in a state Trump won by 20 points. In Iowa, where Trump heads later this week, Republicans are openly fretting over suddenly competitive races for both governor and Senate, a reversal in a state he's carried three elections running.

David McIntosh, president of the influential Club for Growth — which is spending millions to defend GOP seats across the region — acknowledges his group has watched enthusiasm sag in agriculture country since summer. His diagnosis matches what farmers themselves describe: rising input costs colliding with export markets squeezed by retaliatory tariffs.

The administration has tried to respond. An executive order this month eased tax rules on red-dyed diesel, and a $12 billion farm aid package went out in December. So far, neither has closed the gap between what farmers expected from a second Trump term and what they're actually living through this harvest. Even Brunkow, whose Farm Bureau endorsed Marshall, allows that the administration has made costly missteps along the way.

Former Montana Sen. Jon Tester — a third-generation farmer who lived through the 1980s farm crisis, when a wave of his neighbors lost their land — argues this isn't abstract politics. It's whether families can pay their bills at the end of the month, and he believes the economics in farm country right now are arguably worse than they were four decades ago.

None of this guarantees Republicans lose Kansas, Nebraska, or Iowa this November. But it explains why the party is spending unprecedented money defending seats it once considered safe, and why Trump himself feels the need to show up in person. The question these farmers are asking isn't whether they'll abandon the GOP outright — most still say Trump was the right call in 2024. It's whether, standing in a cornfield watching diesel eat into a shrinking margin, they'll bother to show up and vote at all.

Based on reporting by Joey Cappelletti and John Hanna, The Associated Press, with additional sourcing as linked above.