Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for June 10, entitled "Breaking the Heart of the Heartland," in which Krugman tells how the rural vote has shifted against Trump.
In 2024 Donald Trump narrowly won the popular vote, with only a 1.5 percentage point margin. But he won rural areas by 30 points.
Trump
won rural areas by such a large margin because farmers were wildly
optimistic about what he would do for them. The Purdue/CME Ag Economy
Barometer, which is basically an index of farmers’ economic sentiment,
surged with Trump’s victory:
Today,
the rural Trump bump is nowhere to be seen. In fact, white rural
voters’ views about Trump’s economic policy have turned astonishingly
negative. Normally, partisanship strongly colors economic perceptions.
According to a recent Fox News poll, only 29% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 71% disapprove. Yet 60% of Republicans still approve.
Remarkably,
however, rural white voters are no longer behaving like non-rural
Republican voters. They are almost as negative on the economy as the
population as a whole, with only 32% of rural whites approving of
Trump’s handling of the economy, and 68% disapproving. Trump has made
the rural economy so bad that reality has overridden Trump voters’ usual
tendency to make excuses for him.
Farmers, who are highly dependent on imported inputs -- farm machinery, chemicals, fertilizer -- have been hit hard by Trump's tariffs and trade war; rival agricultural exporters like Brazil (soybeans) have taken over market share. In 2025 there was a 46% rise in farm bankruptcies; Krugman says it looks worse in 2026, especially with the Iran war raising the price of gas, diesel, and fertilizer in particular.
Recent polls
show that the Senate race in Iowa, which Trump won by 13 points in
2024, is now effectively a tossup. The heartland may be awakening to
reality, with immense political consequences.
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