Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Matt Hildreth: Thank you for having me on the show. I’m a big fan.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Just to finish, we also have a situation because everyone says, When? When? When are you going to sign deals? We don’t have to sign deals. We can sign 25 deals right now, Howard, if we want it. We don’t have to sign deals. They have to sign deals with us. They want a piece of our market. We don’t want a piece of their market. We don’t care about their market. They want a piece of our market. We’re going to sit down and we’re going to put very fair numbers down and we’re going to say, Here’s what this country [wants], what we want, and, Congratulations, we have a deal. And they’ll either say, Great, and they’ll start shopping, or they’ll say, Not good. We’re not going to do it. And I’ll say, That’s OK. You don’t have to shop.
Hildreth: Yeah, I think that that’s a really good point. When you talk to folks in small towns and rural communities, they’re paying attention to markets. That’s something that you learn when you’re a farmer and you study things like ag economics: It’s all about understanding the markets. And I think sometimes there’s a lot of stereotypes about farmers—that they’re just dumb hayseeds, simple people that sit on tractors all day. Farming is pretty sophisticated. Whether you’re a farm worker working out for the growers in the fields or you’re sitting in a combine, there’s a ton of science and there’s a ton of economics. It’s all economics.
Sargent: Well, The New York Times has a new piece confirming this, reporting that farmers in Iowa are already getting hammered economically and the local economies are slowing down. The Times reports on Monona County where Trump got 72 percent of the vote, quotes a farmer there saying the trade war is going to hit hard. A lot of this is due to China’s tariffs and retaliation against Trump’s tariffs. Matt, you spent a lot of time in rural America. Let’s talk about how important Chinese markets in particular are for farmers in the places that you organize.
Sargent: So Matt, to what degree do you think these farmers are going to blame Trump’s policies, his trade war with China for their inability to sell to those markets? Are they going to say to themselves, Well, the president has asked me as a patriot to swallow all the pain and it’s going to really make things better later in some vague sense for the whole country? Or do they just not really get snowed by that? You’re telling me that the farmers you organize among are pretty shrewd people a lot of the time. You’d think they’d see through the folly of the trade war if that’s the case. Do they?
The other two, I think, are a little bit harder. One is farmers are very stubborn in their position on Trump. I think that’s something that we all know. For many of us that have worked in small towns and rural communities, farmers have supported Trump for a very long time. And a lot of them just did not believe what was in Project 2025. There was so much that we’re seeing now that was outlined in Project 2025. And when we would talk about it, people would say, Yeah, that’s just politics. Trump’s not going to actually do it. So there is that stubbornness.
Sargent: A recent Marist poll found that Trump’s support in rural America has pretty much collapsed. It’s now at parity, 46 to 45, which is really surprising given that Trump carried rural America overwhelmingly in 2024. I’ve got to ask Matt, how seriously should we take that though? Is it a superficial expression of, Oh, the screws are expensive, which you overheard from a rural voter just the other day, something that won’t actually sink its claws into rural America in any real way? Or is there an actual chance that this will alienate a fraction of these voters enough so that they can get peeled away? How real is it that that disapproval of Trump is actually pretty high in rural areas?
We’re not moving voters when it comes to Fox News. We’re not moving voters when it comes to right-wing media. But for the people who are still getting their news from the nightly news, that seems to be where the support is softening the most. And it is setting up an opportunity for Democrats to step into that space. But the numbers reflect what I’m seeing in my day-to-day life. And I think there’s some big questions, though, about what we do with it. Can we sustain it? Is this just a bad week versus is this a real shift in the momentum?
Hildreth: Yeah, absolutely. So in rural America, the local news is always the most trusted news. When we do surveys on “Who do you really trust for your news?” it’s the local papers, it’s the local radio; if there’s TV, it’s the local TV. And when you look at the numbers, Donald Trump won over 90 percent of news deserts across the country. These are communities that don’t have a local source of news on local issues. So they don’t have a local newspaper. They don’t have a local news source through their radios or on television. And that’s where Donald Trump is really succeeding.
And then also amongst the viewers, the people at home that get their news from PBS—PBS is still a huge source of news in small towns and rural communities—or the evening news, that’s where I think we are seeing people move. It’s not huge. It’s like 3 to 5 percentage points right now, but I still think that’s a significant amount of people. And that’s where we really need to focus: the people that are getting their news from places other than Fox News. Yes, most people are getting their news in rural America from Fox News, but it’s not everybody. There’s quite a bit of those independent voters that are getting it from other sources.
Hildreth: Yeah, I think so. And you mentioned the margins. One of the things that we say all the time—it started as a joke, and it’s become kind of an organizational slogan—is “lose less.” So in a lot of places, we’re not actually looking to win even at the city or at the county level. But if we can just move the margins by 3 or 4 percentage points in rural communities across the state, that can have a major impact on statewide elections. So there’s places in Wisconsin where I think we are seeing Democrats at the state level doing a lot better because they are cutting margins in rural areas. We’re seeing that in Georgia. We’re seeing that in North Carolina.
Sargent: Well, there’s one other area for Dems to exploit as well: cuts to food stamps. That’s something that can also hit rural areas pretty hard. You’ve actually got some vulnerable House Republicans from rural districts like Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin and Don Bacon in Nebraska making noise about opposing these cuts. But House Democrats just put forward this discharge petition—which could theoretically pass without the GOP leadership supporting it—that would protect Medicaid and food stamps from GOP cuts. You’d only need a few Republicans to support that for it to pass—but let’s face it, that won’t happen. No Republicans will get onto it. Is there any way for Democrats to use that to inflict political pain on Republicans among rural voters?
Food stamps or SNAP, those impact rural communities on two fronts. One, rural Americans are more likely to use those benefits just because the poverty levels are higher in a lot of small towns and rural communities. But also, those benefits are going to farmers. So it’s not just about benefits to people who are hungry; it’s also about creating higher demand for farmers. And that’s why you see it impacting in places like Wisconsin and Iowa and a number of these congressional districts. We don’t need to flip a ton of congressional districts to have a massive impact on our politics right now. And when it comes to Medicaid, there’s between six and 10 Republicans at any moment that are really feeling that pressure. Piling on with SNAP and piling on with the Elon Musk conversation about cutting Social Security, I think that’s all really good for Democrats right now.
Hildreth: Well, the question about whether or not we’re going to get disappointed again is, I think, a very real question. That’s the thing that keeps me up at night, and that’s the whole focus of our organization. But there is ... It is a special moment right now. And something that those of us from small towns and rural communities that are engaged in politics and policy know well is that the federal government is actually absolutely critical for small towns and rural communities. Everybody thinks [about] Ronald Reagan’s [saying], “The worst thing you can say is I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” They think that’s something that just resonates with people in rural America—and it does from a bumper sticker point of view. But the fact is that rural Americans are very connected to the federal government through employment.
And so much of the federal government services in rural communities have a local brand. So you might not know the USDA at the national level, but you know the local guy who you go to when your tomatoes aren’t growing. And once those people start telling you, Hey, these cuts are having an impact, I might get fired, that’s really, I think, waking people up in small towns and rural communities.
Hildreth: Right. The question is: Are they going to connect it to the Republican Party? And are Democrats going to be able to take advantage of it if they do? I think a lot of that is still out for debate, but right now, it doesn’t really matter what Fox News is telling you when you go to the hardware store and screws have gone up 100 percent. Something is off. And across the battleground states, Donald Trump had signs that said, “Donald Trump means lower prices, Kamala Harris means higher prices.” And people know that’s not happening right now. That’s a pretty simple and pretty effective message, and it’s actually backfiring on him right now because things are going up so dramatically.
Sargent: Well, we should probably have another pod soon to talk about whether Democrats are actually stepping into that space, which is a very big topic. Matt Hildreth, thanks so much for coming on, man.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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