Farmers Voted for This

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

American farmers rely on imports for many of their most critical inputs—fertilizer, chemicals, machinery—and rely on exports to large overseas markets such as China for a big part of their profits, and, as such, conducting a series of trade wars fought with tariffs is just about the worst possible economic policy for them as a group. Naturally, American farmers and farming communities keep voting roughly two-to-one for trade wars—a vote for Donald Trump, the guy who insists that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” is a vote for trade wars.

 

Farmers voted for trade wars, and trade wars they got.

 

And—surprise!—agriculture is in something like a full-blown recession, with farm incomes projected to decline by a whopping 5.5 percent in real terms this year. Farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent since 2024, and some 15,000 farming operations went dark last year. This is an entirely predictable outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

 

In much the same way that Americans lately have been promised that gasoline and diesel prices are just on the verge of going back down—and in much the same way that the Republican standard-bearer has been three weeks away from a healthcare plan for 12 years now and running—Trump keeps saying that the Chinese have committed to buying $x billion worth of this or that commodity from U.S. farmers, and—surprise!—those commitments continue to go unrealized, with China being at the moment many, many billions of dollars behind on promised orders from U.S. farmers. “We like to hear commitments from Chinese buyers, but we also need to see beans on boats headed west,” says a board member of the American Soybean Association. It is almost as though one cannot quite trust in the good intentions of an authoritarian police state run by Communist Party oligarchs or in the sound judgment of a serially bankrupt former game show host who once tried to overthrow the U.S. government. Which raises the question:

 

Why are American farmers such a bunch of chumps?

 

Thomas Frank’s famous thesis, spelled out in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, is that shady right-wing corporate interests have successfully used culture-war rhetoric and Jesus talk to snooker Middle America’s farmers, blue-collar workers, and small-business owners into—all together now!—“voting against their own interests.” It isn’t a very good thesis, inasmuch as the evidence very strongly suggests that voting in a way that would appear to be at least superficially at odds with one’s self-interest is so common as to be nearly universal in American politics. Americans are not especially self-interested voters.

 

For example, college-educated white voters and college-educated African American voters are, on average, more progressive than the non-college-educated of their respective racial groups, and college-educated white voters in particular are more likely than their non-college counterparts to support redistributive tax and welfare policies that are likely to increase their own tax burden while providing no benefit to them, their families, or, in general, to people who are economically similar to them. The Democrats are the party friendlier toward redistributive tax and welfare policies, and it is the Democrats—not the Republicans—who in recent years have seen the most growth in their support among the educated and affluent most likely to be disadvantaged by those policies. As Sam Zacher, a researcher with the progressive Analyst Institute, observes in a very interesting 2024 paper titled “The Polarization of the Rich: The New Democratic Allegiance of Affluent Americans and the Politics of Redistribution”:

 

Strikingly, in multiple elections since the 2010s, the data actually show a form of “backwards” polarization: majorities of affluent voters voted for Democratic candidates. Specifically, some evidence shows that Democratic candidates actually beat Republicans in attaining support from the top 5% (by income), the highest income stock- owning voters, and even the top 1% of voters (by income) over the past decade.

 

That being well-disposed toward welfare programs (to linger on an illuminating example) does not neatly follow income should not surprise you very much if you have thought through the issues a little bit. There are many possible factors at work. High-income African American voters, having the shared experience of racial discrimination, may be more oriented toward racial solidarity than class interest and may see their socioeconomic status as necessarily tied up with the shared interests of black Americans, who are more likely to rely on welfare programs than whites. (African Americans make up about 13 percent of the overall population but more than twice that share of SNAP beneficiaries, for example.) Similarly: For years, I have been chronicling the leftward political drift of Wall Street, and people who are surprised by the political loyalties of the men and women at the commanding heights of finance should consider that these voters are disproportionately products of the Ivy League and other elite universities, that they largely live and work in and around New York City and other major metros, and that they have a great deal politically in common with similarly situated voters who do not work in finance but who share experiences and interests with the Wall Street gang even if they occupy lower tax brackets. A related, albeit cynical, possibility is that affluent Americans of all backgrounds have an unarticulated but understood interest in giving the poor just enough to depress any more radical efforts at economic reorganization, in much the same way that many historians see the emergence of the Bismarckian welfare state as an essentially conservative program meant to take the steam out of the socialists with more far-reaching ambitions.

 

Whatever the reason, it is reasonably well-established that economic self-interest has very little reliable effect on voting or policy preferences. As the economist Bryan Caplan observes, “self-interest has little effect on public opinion.” Caplan is among those who believe that we would have better politics if voters were more self-interested because altruistic attitudes so often lead voters to support “foolish policies,” and he laments that the stereotypical, conspiracy-theory-adjacent view that our policymaking agenda is dominated by billionaires is—alas!—not quite true. Rather, there is broad agreement across income groups on many big policy questions, including the big economic ones, though the very wealthy do tend to prevail in those cases where they sharply disagree with the non-wealthy. In those cases, Caplan writes, “democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich. And since I think that statist policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes, my sincere reaction is to say, ‘Thank goodness.’”

 

In much the same way that Harvard-educated, Manhattan-dwelling Wall Street traders vote a lot like Harvard-educated, Manhattan-dwelling nonprofit executives, rural America has a fair number of export-dependent farmers who vote a lot like the clerk down at the feed-and-seed. Many of those farmers are multimillionaires with graduate degrees from Texas A&M who run sophisticated high-tech businesses and know a hell of a lot more about crop genomics than Bobby Kennedy Jr. does and a good deal more about practical Chinese politics than Marco Rubio does: They aren’t rubes—but they vote like rubes.

 

Well, I didn’t vote for an assault on American farmers! I didn’t vote for $6.59 diesel because I wanted to spend $320 to fill up my F-250. I didn’t vote for chaos! I didn’t vote for this! I hear that all the time. But the truth is, some 77 million Americans did vote precisely for this. Trump ran as a trade-war and tariffs guy. This is what a trade war looks like: It makes you poor and vulnerable. Trump’s low character was a matter of public record way back in the ancient days when the great big wall in our political discourse was the one running through Berlin. His profound ignorance, biliousness, and moral grotesquery long have been observable in American public life for anybody with enough money to buy a copy of the New York Post. Americans should have known better in 2016, but there’s no excuse for not having known better in 2024. Farmers voted for this just as much as Philadelphians have spent two generations or more voting for high crime and crappy schools and Angelenos have voted for ... well, go there and have a look around.

 

There are better ways to govern. We could begin with Caplan’s observation—which is unimpeachable—that Americans’ “policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes,” e.g., that a country can get rich by blockading its own ports, literally bombing its own supply chains, having the state seize the means of production, and deporting a chunk of its workforce—and doing so because a pampered and half-literate New York City real estate heir thinks socks and building supplies aren’t expensive enough.

 

Yes, Americans voted for this: Farmers and car dealers and a whole lot of people who should have known better. The question is how much pain it is going to take for Americans to choose something better.