Heartland...

Trump woos the heartland

The magnate has polled especially well in rural counties — notwithstanding his hard-line positions on illegal immigration and trade, which might have ruinous consequences for farmers. 

By Helena Bottemiller Evich

Donald Trump may be a penthouse-dwelling New York City slicker, but he’s winning hearts in rural America — and his campaign has quietly started reaching out to farmers to bolster support in key agricultural states.

A group called Farmers for Trump, launched recently in Georgia, has been working with the campaign to answer farmers’ questions about where the real estate mogul stands on their issues — topics he has mostly avoided on the campaign trail.

Chad Etheridge, who founded the group after learning how Trump saved a Georgia farm from foreclosure in 1986, made a YouTube video about the little-known episode. Since then, Etheridge’s group has made about 300 calls to farmers asking them if they would support the businessman, and all but 10 have answered “yes.”

“I am positive not all farmers support Trump,” Etheridge said, “but it sure seems like the numbers are in his favor.”

Efforts by such fledgling groups to turn out the rural vote could be crucial to the presumptive nominee’s hopes of winning Rust Belt states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania in November — all of which also happen to be big farm states. Though farmers themselves make up less than 2 percent of the population, agriculture remains an anchor of rural economies.

“When you look at the states that Trump wants to put in play … agriculture could play a bigger role in this election than in the recent past,” predicts Marshall Matz, principal at Olsson Frank Weeda Terman Matz, a law and lobbying firm, who chaired President Barack Obama’s rural council in 2008. “People don’t realize those states have significant agricultural economies.”

But Matz, who is active in Democratic politics, doesn’t see Trump as a slam dunk with farmers despite their strong Republican leanings. He notes Hillary Clinton’s promises to boost support for farms of all sizes, while Trump has been silent on such issues — or worse, pledged to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, which would devastate farmers who rely on their labor.

“With Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, the farm vote is in play,” Matz contends.

The view from the ground is different: From the rural South through Nevada, the magnate has polled especially well in rural counties — notwithstanding his hard-line positions on illegal immigration and trade, which might have ruinous consequences for farmers.

“Donald Trump says things that I would never say, but the voters want change,” John Block, an agriculture secretary under Ronald Reagan who also works forOlsson Frank Weeda, wrote in a recent column.

While Trump has not formally named farm advisers — by this point in 2012, Mitt Romney had announced an entire advisory committee — the Trump campaign has developed the beginnings of a platform in conversations with grassroots supporters like Etheridge’s farmers’ group.

Besides Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the Mexican border, his campaign told farmers that he supports reviewing the guest worker programs that give farmers access to legal migrants — a stance many farmers applaud.

Trump endorses crop insurance, a top priority for farmers and, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, advocates separating the food stamp program from the farm bill, adding that he believes “agriculture is not about food — it is about national security,” according to another campaign response. That idea is divisive among farm-state lawmakers because it threatens the urban-rural coalition that has won passage of the farm bill every five years.

Trump has also been making personal pitches to agriculture leaders. He meets Friday with farm leaders in Fresno, California, to talk about water management in the Central Valley — one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions.

And in February, shortly after Georgia poultry and cattle farmer Zippy Duvall was elected president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, the country’s largest and most powerful farm group, Trump got on the phone to congratulate him.

“It was a good conversation,” said spokesman Will Rogers, who said Trump asked Duvall for the group’s endorsement. The Farm Bureau does not endorse candidates, but Duvall encouraged Trump to talk about agriculture policy on the campaign trail.

“Trump said he agreed that farmers are in fact over-regulated and that he would fix that as soon as he became president,” Rogers said.

Leaders of the Farm Bureau said they were unaware the Trump campaign was engaging in direct conversations with farmers. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway, a Trump supporter who has offered the candidate help in crafting a platform, also had no idea such talks were happening.

"Right now, none of us have a clue what his agriculture policies might be,” Conaway told reporters two weeks ago.

‘Saving a poor Georgia farmer’

The effort to connect farmers with the Trump campaign dates to December, when Growing America, a Georgia-based farm news site that Etheridge runs, tracked down Betsy Sharp to talk about how Trump had saved her family’s farm.

In the video, Sharp tells how her late father, Lenard Hill committed suicide in 1986 in a tragic attempt to keep his farm from being seized. He mistakenly thought his life insurance would pay off the debt and allow his family to keep the land. But the policy prohibited a payout for suicide and the bank moved to foreclose on the property that had been in the family for generations.

“When Trump heard the story, he reached out to help save it,” Sharp said. Trump gave her mother, Annabel Hill, $20,000 to hold off the bank and then helped to raise more, according to news accounts at the time. In the end, Trump and a group of businessmen contributed $78,000 to clear the debt, the accounts said.

“We were very shocked and very appreciative of a man who was ... very famous and had lots of money would be interested in saving a poor Georgia farmer,” Sharp said in the video.

Brandon Phillips, director of the Trump campaign in Georgia, saw the video — which has been viewed almost 127,000 times — and reached out to Growing America with “an interest in developing a deeper relationship with farmers,” said Etheridge.

Etheridge, who said he has never worked for a campaign, was receptive, later founding Farmers for Trump and chairing the Georgia Farm Team for Trump — roles he’s assumed as a private citizen.

Ever since, Farmers for Trump, which has about 820 followers on Facebook, has been engaging regularly with the campaign.

“They made their senior policy advisers available to answer questions farmers had and they didn’t shy away from giving real answers,” said Etheridge. “He really grew his support among farmers when he explained farming wasn’t just about feeding the world, but ultimately, it was about national security.”

Etheridge declined to name the Trump advisers he has worked with. In the past, the campaign has pointed reporters to Sam Clovis, an Iowa Republican operative, for policy questions, but the campaign declined to respond to several recent inquiries about their agriculture advisers.

It has responded to farmers, however — with Farmers for Trump acting as the go-between, fielding questions from Facebook and email and then getting the campaign’s responses back to the farmers, usually within a few days.

Farmers ask mostly about immigration and the farm bill, Etheridge said, and the Trump campaign has given them responses on both.

“Visa programs will have to be reviewed and when we have confidence that the programs comport with all security requirements, we will make sure that people who want to enter this country legally can do so,” the Trump campaign said in a statement to Farmers for Trump. “This includes the H1 and H2 programs.” (The H2 visa program is heavily relied upon by farmers for a migrant workforce, but the program has been plagued with bureaucratic delays and red tape).

The campaign also laid out Trump’s stance on the farm bill, an issue the candidate has never addressed on the campaign trail.

“Like energy, America must be self-sufficient and must protect our nation's ability to feed itself and the rest of the world. Separating the Food Stamp Program from the farm bill will allow Congress to do its job and focus on agriculture as a national security issue.”

Last February, Farmers for Trump held its first rally in Sasser, Georgia, complete with barbecue, crop dusters flying overhead and several hundred farmers. Roughly 800 people showed up — a figure more than three times the town’s population. A folk band sang “Don’t be a chump, vote for Trump.”

Farmers reject stereotypes of Trump voters

The farmers POLITICO spoke to bristled at how Trump supporters have been characterized in the media as largely angry and uneducated.

Randy Hudson, who describes himself as a fifth-generation pecan grower and a third-generation Democrat, and who has a Ph.D. in entomology, began leaning Republican in 2012 and says he is now an enthusiastic Trump supporter.

Hudson, who leads the export promotion group, U.S. Pecans (his support for Trump is separate from the group), said he travels the world promoting pecans and is frustrated that other countries have invested so heavily in infrastructure while the U.S. lets its roads, airports and waterways crumble.

He also believes Trump will moderate his stance on immigration. “Is he going to deport 15 million people? No he’s not. He’s going to come back to the middle.”

And he is convinced that Trump will go to bat for exports, despite the candidate’s opposition to the recently negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that gets strong support from most farm groups.

“One of these days, I’ll have to answer to my grandfather,” Hudson said, noting both his father and grandfather served as Democratic lawmakers in the Georgia Legislature. “I can just see him standing at the pearly gates saying, ‘I see you have a big R on your forehead, you need to explain that!’”

Of course, the vast majority of farmers still don’t know where Trump stands on their issues, but that may not be an obstacle for the candidate. Policy, after all, doesn’t seem really central to Trump’s appeal, said Tim Marema, editor of the Daily Yonder, a rural-focused news site based in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Whitesburg, Kentucky, that tracks closely rural voting trends.

“Trump's approach to policy comes down to narrative sound bites,” he said. “Immigration: Build a wall. Women: Women love me. Foreign policy: Make America great again. Coal: Bring the jobs back ... If Trump remembers that he helped pay the mortgage of the farm widow, perhaps that will become his ag narrative: I care about farmers; I saved a farm widow once. In other words, there are no policies to examine, only stories.”