Here’s a bit of poetic justice for you: The Democratic bid for control of Congress just might end up running right through the very heart of Trump country. We’re talking about parts of the Midwest that helped drive Donald Trump’s two successful presidential bids—states like Iowa and Ohio, which he drove deeper into the red column, and states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which Trump flipped outright twice.
That reality explains why Trump’s extended eruption of fury at Canada—he has now redoubled trade hostilities with our longtime ally—is very bad news for the GOP. Trump’s new trade war with Canada threatens fresh harms to local economies in the Midwest—and it’s handing Democrats a weapon in the homestretch of these contests to win over rural Americans and others who are experiencing all this endless derangement in very concrete ways.
“It’s a really dangerous time to be a farmer in the Midwest,” Josh Turek, the Democrat who is challenging Representative Ashley Hinson for the open Senate seat in Iowa, told me.
On Monday, Trump exploded wildly at Canada over the implosion of trade negotiations between the two countries. That collapse in talks over the weekend unleashed 50 percent tariffs by the United States on a large range of Canadian goods, and Canada will now retaliate with tariffs on targeted American exports. Talks are reportedly suspended until after the midterms.
What triggered Trump is that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had refused to be cowed by the American threat of tariffs. So Trump threatened yet more tariffs on still more Canadian goods next year, raging: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!”
Whether we “need” Canada or not, the fact remains that a lot of trade currently takes place between the two countries. You know who actually can’t afford for all this to be upended right now? Republican incumbents and candidates in the Midwest, that’s who. So “we” may not “need” Canada, but Republicans in the region really “need” Trump to not rupture trade relations with our ally for the next two months.
Here’s why: Control of the House will turn in no small part on three very competitive House races in Iowa, one in Wisconsin, and three or four in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Turek is locked in a dead heat in the Iowa Senate race, and winning there could be pivotal to a Democratic Senate takeover. So could a win by Sherrod Brown, who leads slightly in Ohio. And anything that helps Abdul El-Sayed keep the highly contested Michigan Senate seat blue will also be critical.
These areas will very likely feel the political impact of Trump’s new trade war. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are expected to hit American exports of agricultural machinery, and that could hit Iowa manufacturers. The state’s very competitive second congressional district, for instance, includes facilities run by John Deere, Altorfer (which deals in Caterpillar products), and other farm equipment concerns.
“Tariffs don’t just hurt our farmers, they hurt our manufacturers as well,” Lindsay James, the Democratic candidate in that district, told me. She added that her GOP opponent, businessman Joe Mitchell, will be a “rubberstamp” for Trump’s trade wars, which she labeled “impulsive.”
Such messages could land disproportionately in Iowa because Trump’s trade wars have already given the state’s agricultural economy a thorough pounding.
Turek, meanwhile, also singled out the coming impact of trade hostilities on farm equipment manufacturers. He noted that tariffs are contributing to a perfect storm in Iowa, which also includes Trump’s war on Iran, which is driving up fertilizer and diesel prices, and his effort to reduce beef prices by importing huge amounts of it, which will undercut American producers.
“You talk to farmers, and they’ll tell you it’s one gut punch after another,” Turek told me, adding that he constantly hears Iowans tell him: “This is betrayal.”
Or take Wisconsin’s third congressional district, where Rebecca Cooke, who grew up on a dairy farm, is challenging GOP incumbent Derrick Van Orden. In Wisconsin, local press coverage of Trump’s latest trade-warring is already forecasting that the state’s exports of dairy goods and farm equipment to Canada could be hit by retaliatory tariffs.
“It’s going to impact the district in a huge way,” Cooke told me. This could resonate in Wisconsin because the state, like Iowa, already has gotten badly hurt by previous Trump trade-warring, Cooke said: “Farmers are already feeling the squeeze, and this will hurt agricultural communities even more.”
All this gives Dems a potent line of attack on incumbent Republicans: that they’ve done nothing to resist the tariffs, even though the levies constitute a huge usurpation of their own power—that is, of Congress’s power to tax.
“Derrick Van Orden has gone right along with whatever Trump says,” Cooke told me. “He’s a lackey for this administration.”
In fact, the trade-warring may be providing a back-door way to make Trump a liability for GOP candidates even in places that backed Trump by large margins. Voters there appear prepared to agree that policies coming out of Washington are hurting them. So some Democrats are making their races about GOP incumbents’ failure to protect voters from those policies, without too much specific talk about Trump that might trigger negative partisanship.
This dynamic may prove particularly pronounced in the Midwest. Some experts on the region point out that it’s already been disproportionately hurt by Trump’s trade wars, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tells me it plans to make the latest round a liability for “every Midwestern Republican.”
Note that Trump’s latest eruption vows 50 percent tariffs on a whole slew of Canadian cars, trucks, and automotive parts. How do you think rupturing the auto industry’s complex cross-border supply chains—which are so deeply interconnected that they’ve been called the “Great Lakes supercluster”—will go over in Michigan and Ohio?
There’s still more. Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, points out that Canada is the state’s number one trading partner, with agricultural crops and equipment constituting a “huge industry” in all its competitive House districts. Speaking about Trump’s new trade-warring, Bonder said: “You can’t overstate how much this hurts Pennsylvania’s economy.”
Ron Brownstein recently identified a paradox embedded in Trumpism. Trump’s political successes have been particularly transformative in Midwestern states with large percentages of blue-collar whites in them. Yet in these midterms, his profound unpopularity is now pushing even states he’s turned deep red—like Iowa and Ohio—to revert to competitive swing states.
There’s another layer of irony here, however. The shock of Trump’s 2024 victory led many commentators to conclude that his right-wing populist nationalism had touched a deep, authentic wellspring of sentiment in the American electorate. Yet his mass deportations have unleashed ferocious national opposition. His “America First” unshackling of the U.S. military from international commitments and alliances is absolutely tanking his public standing. And now, if his tariffs and trade-warring help produce a massive electoral backlash—right in the region long mythologized as the heartland of Trumpian populism—it would represent a fitting and highly satisfying outcome indeed.
