Anxiety rising...

Pence launches Midwest damage control mission

With anxiety rising over Trump’s trade policies, the vice president is stumping for endangered incumbents and reassuring big GOP donors.

By NATASHA KORECKI

Vice President Mike Pence begins a campaign swing through the Midwest on Wednesday designed to fire up the base in three battleground House districts. But there’s also a secondary mission: damage control.

In the face of a trade war that intensified just four days ago, Pence is quietly setting up one-on-one meetings with major Midwestern donors where he is prepared to blunt concerns over an escalating situation that’s beginning to wreak havoc on markets, farmers and employers across the region.

“The cost and impact is being felt by farmers for several weeks now. It’s real. It’s a fact. It’s happening,” said Kirk Leeds, Iowa Soybean Association CEO. “Even if we find a way, between China and the United States, to find a political face-saving compromise, it’s the long-term consequences of the disruption in these trade patterns that we worry about.”

The vice-president’s trip — announced Monday, just days after the United States leveled a 25 percent tariff on $34 billion of Chinese goods and China enacted equivalent retaliatory tariffs — will take him to Kansas City, Cedar Rapids and Chicago, where he’ll meet privately with big donors and attend fundraisers for three embattled Republican House incumbents.

Pence is also planning public events with America First Policies, a group that is advocating for the Trump tax cuts.

“Pence is a smart guy and one of our best messengers to reassure donors,” said Pat Brady, a former Illinois Republican Party chair. “He’s the perfect person to reassure donors and activists.”

The timing of the visits, paired with the donor meetings, is the first sign of an administration effort to manage political blowback from a trade war the president started — a confrontation that could prove costly to the GOP’s efforts to hold its majorities in the House and the Senate.

Pence is expected to make his pitch from a position of strength, highlighting President Donald Trump’s choice of Brett Kavanaugh for the next Supreme Court justice and the tax cuts that have benefited top-tier brackets and large-scale employers, a Republican operative with knowledge of the meetings told POLITICO.

In his meetings, the vice president is also expected to make a straight-up appeal to GOP donors to imagine how drastically policies would shift if Democrats won control of Congress.

Pence’s Midwestern swing is occurring as the president takes to the world stage in Europe, amid rising anxiety back home among parts of his base — particularly in rural, agriculturally-oriented counties that swung to Trump in 2016.

“Since the announcement of the tariffs: we’ve lost 20 percent of our income in soybeans, that’s nationally,” said Bret Davis, an Ohio farmer who also serves as a director of the American Soybean Association.

Davis fears the repercussions of a long-term trade impasse. “We spent 35 years now working on this, trying to get trade with China to this point … It’s going to take years now to get this back.”

As industry leaders warn of the long-term impact of Trump’s stance on trade, the president showed signs of digging in, announcing yet another round of tariffs on Tuesday.

Nowhere is the economic unease surrounding those policies more apparent than in Iowa, where the state’s Republican congressional delegation at first vowed to stand behind Trump and urged Iowans to be patient as the president worked out a deal they believed would improve the U.S. economy in the long-run.

Their posture is already showing signs of changing, however — two weeks ago the state’s two senators and three GOP congressmen sent the administration a joint letter reiterating the devastating impact tariffs will have on the state.

After a Kansas City fundraiser for Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder on Wednesday, Pence will appear with House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Rod Blum in northeastern Iowa, where pork producers and soybean farmers are seeing profits plummet.

Blum and the vice president are scheduled to tour Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, an aerospace manufacturer and major local employer. The company, recently acquired by United Technologies, reaped rewards from Trump’s tax bill, a point Pence is expected to highlight in his visit.

The trade issue, already making headlines in the governor’s race, is proving to be a key wedge issue for Blum’s Democratic opponent, who’s questioning why Pence didn’t schedule face time with the agricultural sector.

“We are projecting to lose $1 billion here, just on pork and soybeans alone,” said state Rep. Abby Finkenauer. “Iowa is very different than the rest of the country. If our ag economy and our farming economy are not doing well, neither is our manufacturing. We make combines and plows here. It affects us all across the board.”

Finkenauer said Republicans’ call for patience was insulting.

“I’m sorry, what about the families that are waking up every single day, worried about their futures, worried about what their incomes are gonna look like?” she said. “Our farmers cannot afford more time. To have Republican leadership say that is insulting to the families here in Iowa.”

Blum’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, Pence is scheduled to return to the Midwest for an American First Policies tax event and a fundraiser in suburban Chicago. The vice president is advertised as the headliner for a fundraiser for Rep. Peter Roskam, whose district — carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016 — is the number one Democratic target in Illinois.

An invitation to the fundraiser asks for a $25,000-a-couple donation.

Part of Roskam’s district is heavy in manufacturing, which is already seeing an impact from steel tariffs.

“It makes complete sense to me, I’m glad [Pence is] doing it because there are a lot of Republicans like me who are wondering what the president is doing in this so-called trade war,” Brady said. “We’re free traders. I’m all for fixing it, but not for going to war over it. I hope there’s a plan, or an end game. Trade wars are not good for business.”