David M. Shribman: Republicans are reaping what they sowed in farm country

BONDURANT, Iowa ― You know you're in Iowa when your car is passed on Interstate 80 by a 12-wheeler truck with the message "Pork Blood Only ― Inedible, Not Intended for Human Food." You know it's campaign season when the radio is clogged with political ads deriding an opponent as "too liberal" and "creepy." And you know the Republicans are scared when they feel moved to dispatch House Speaker Mike Johnson to the eastern reaches of the state on a mercy mission to help salvage a Republican congressional seat in a district Donald Trump won by more than 8 percentage points only two years ago.

It's both campaign season and harvest season in Iowa, and the Democrats are reaping what the Republicans have sowed ― or at least the farm and affordability crisis the Democrats are blaming on the war on Iran, Trump and the GOP.

It's the Republican Party that is taking the heat and, according to multiple polls, is perhaps on the verge of taking a shellacking in next month's midterm elections here. Caveat: Polling in this state that showed Kamala Harris defeating Trump by 3 percentage points in 2024 prompted a furor over the accuracy of political surveys. The president prevailed by a margin of 13 percentage points and swept 94 of the state's 99 counties.

Hardly anyone ― not even Republican finance and strategy groups, according to leaked memoranda ― is expecting a surprise like that, or a polling snafu that big, this time.

The reasons are manifest: Gasoline prices are skyrocketing, important in a state with long travel distances. Diesel prices are punishing, affecting the movement of crops and the operation of farm implements. Fertilizer prices are mounting, endangering plantings for the future. The Trump tariffs, including against Canada, the state's largest trading partner, are reshaping commercial patterns and putting Iowa's export trade in jeopardy.

For Republicans, the political outlook is as grim as the farm economy ― no surprise because the two have been connected for decades.

Republican presidential nominees won 16 of the 17 elections before the 1932 contest, held amid the rural economic crisis that prompted a rebellion in western Iowa. There was a farmer blockade of highways in Council Bluffs; desperate pleas to withhold crops from market; and an uprising of 500 farmers in Le Mars who stormed the county courthouse, placing a noose around the neck of a judge who approved farm foreclosures. The Republican candidate, President Herbert Hoover, was from Iowa. No matter. Franklin D. Roosevelt won the state by nearly 18 percentage points.

Those kinds of margins against the Republicans are unlikely as Iowa again is experiencing one of its periodic farm crises, though one that so far is less severe than the one in the 1980s, when a credit crunch, foreclosures, suicides, the death of small towns and the loss of thousands of John Deere farm implement jobs prompted the singers Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp to mobilize for the original Farm Aid benefit concert.

Even so, the state's four-seat delegation to the House of Representatives, solidly Republican since the 2020 election, seems primed to be split evenly between the two parties. The state now has two Republican senators; the retirement of Sen. Joni Ernst could very well result in the election of a Democrat to her seat. The governor's office that has been held by a Republican since 2011 now seems destined to be filled by a Democrat.

The term "turnover" is turning out to mean more than the pastry delicacies sold across the state this time of year, when the Jonagold, Fuji, Braeburn, Pink Lady, Mutsu, Ludacrisp and Evercrisp apples are at their maturity.

"The Republican domination," said Donna Hoffman, a University of Northern Iowa political science professor, "is likely to suffer at least some chinks."

The Democratic resurgence is being led by 44-year-old state auditor Rob Sand, who the other day opened his appearance before a crowd at Grinnell College, 54 miles east of Des Moines, by saying, "We've had 10 years of one-party control of Iowa." He's the Democratic nominee for governor, and he's almost a sure bet to defeat businessman Zach Lahn, whom the Republicans chose to replace Kim Reynolds, winner of the 2022 gubernatorial race by more than 18 percentage points.

Sand is a casting director's ideal choice for the age. He's an unusually informal, approachable figure; you could almost imagine his wife, from a family running an agribusiness empire, seeing his disheveled shirt and sagging trousers and saying before he left the house that morning, "You're going out looking like that?" He has a record of unearthing the kind of outrages (perpetrated by what his campaign describes as "scammers, taxpayer abusers and thieves") that win headlines. His campaign slogan ― the perfect zeitgeist of the age ― is "Not redder or bluer, but better and truer."

But the battle with national implications is for the Senate, where Ernst, first elected in 2014, is another Republican retiree.

In that race, Rep. Ashley Hinson ― a onetime Trump loyalist and Iran war supporter turned self-proclaimed independent and war opponent ― is struggling against state Rep. Josh Turek, whom even Republican strategists and funders acknowledge in private correspondence is an immensely attractive figure. Turek, who has spina bifida, is a three-time Paralympic wheelchair basketball medalist. He taunts his rival for her allegiance to Trump at a time when, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released in recent days, three-quarters of Iowans believe Trump's policies have increased the cost of living in state.

That came into sharp focus in the candidates' television debate, where Turek blamed Iowa's high gasoline and diesel prices on Hinson's support of Trump policies, especially in Iran. Hinson's response: "I'll be President Trump's ally when it is important for Iowa," Hinson said. "But I will push back on him ― he knows this because I talk to him regularly ― on things that are wrong for our state."

That has the air of a line carefully crafted and rehearsed to respond to a predictable attack.

Similar ripostes are being issued across the country, where, according to a Reuters survey, two-thirds of Republican candidates in tight midterm races have created separation from Trump. The president is asking voters, as he did this month in Mobile, Alabama, to "just close your eyes and pretend I'm on the ballot." Here and elsewhere, that would mean closing their eyes to reality ― and perhaps closing off their chances of prevailing in November.

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David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.