Iowa is the sort of place that U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs were ostensibly meant to help. A state of 3.2 million between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, it is where the Rust Belt gives way to the country’s agricultural heartland.
By Mr. Trump’s logic, walling off the U.S. economy is supposed to both reshore factories and force trading partners to import more products from American farmers.
Instead, both these sectors of Iowa’s economy are getting hammered by the President’s trade protectionism and his war on Iran. Rising fertilizer costs and closing export markets are hurting farmers. Manufacturers that use steel and aluminum, such as agricultural equipment giant John Deere, are paying more for those heavily tariffed inputs. Both are getting stung by soaring prices for diesel and gasoline.
Tariffs have been a source of economic anxiety in Davenport, Iowa, and other manufacturing hubs on the Mississippi River. Voters will have a chance to act on those feelings at the Nov. 3 midterms.
It’s all helping to make Iowa, which has been solidly Republican for the past decade and a half, a swing state again. Ahead of midterm elections on Nov. 3, Democrats are polling competitively in races for the governorship, a Senate seat and three congressional districts, all currently held by Republicans.
To Jerry Mohr, who has spent his life growing corn and soybeans north of Davenport, Iowa, it’s the worst the economy has been since the farm crisis of the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of farmers lost their operations to foreclosure.
The price of diesel is up more than 70 per cent since last year, and fertilizer costs 30 per cent more. Every replacement part for farm equipment is more expensive, too, Mr. Mohr says.
Sitting in the living room of the red-brick farmhouse that has been in his family since 1866, the 74-year-old is particularly bemused that the White House is tariffing America’s next-door neighbours. “Our two largest trading partners right now are Canada and Mexico – don’t be throwing bricks at them.”
This home once played host to George H.W. Bush, who, in the summer of 1987, launched his successful presidential bid from the front porch. Mr. Mohr remains true to the free-market thinking that defined the Republican Party of that era, and which Mr. Trump is doing his best to erase.
“Let free trade work – all boats float when the tide comes up,” Mr. Mohr says. “Stay out of farmers’ way and the world will come to us. We have to be welcoming and we have to be willing to trade things.”
In the midterms, he’s supporting the Democrats.
Down the road from Mr. Mohr’s operation, across gently undulating chequerboard fields of corn and soy, several friends enjoying breakfast at the Tasty Café in the village of Eldridge say they plan to vote Republican but express a range of views on the party’s leader.
Sean Eckhardt, 59, says the trade war with Canada is the wrong way to handle commercial disputes between close allies. In his work as a realtor, he’s seen how tariffs on softwood lumber drive up costs for builders of new homes.
“The politics are causing the average citizen to say, ‘I hate America’ or ‘I hate Canada,’ and it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” he says.
Sean Eckhardt says the Canada-U.S. trade war doesn't make much sense to him.
A 26-year military veteran, including a stint as an electrician on a Navy ship during Operation Desert Storm, he also finds Mr. Trump’s go-it-alone handling of Iran a mess. “He should have built a coalition of nations before he did that. Because now, it’s American soldiers and sailors being put in harm’s way, and where is the exit?”
And he has no time for the culture wars. His politics, he says, are generally libertarian, and two of his children are gay. “Be who you want to be, love who you want to love, I don’t care about that stuff. I don’t think it’s going to be the downfall of a civilization because somebody wants to be called ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’ or ‘them,’” he says.
Still, he’s voting GOP because he doesn’t trust the Democrats to manage the economy, particularly with the ascendence of the party’s socialist faction.
Billy Collins, co-owner of a Davenport restaurant, sees more logic in Donald Trump's tariffs than his friend Mr. Eckhardt.
One of his friends, Billy Collins, pushes back on Mr. Eckhardt over trade.
“The tariffs were put in place for a reason, to level the playing field. The United States doesn’t get a fair shake,” he says.
A 66-year-old with wavy white hair who owns a restaurant in downtown Davenport, Mr. Collins argues that the short-term pain of both Mr. Trump’s fight with Canada and war on Iran will lead to a better place in the long run.
“We had to do it on Iran. They were getting really close to being able to send a rocket right down your smokestack,” he says. “We are suffering right now financially because of oil, but we’ve got to think a little bit longer term.”
Both men grew up here and are proud that most of their adult children have stayed, including two of Mr. Collins’s daughters who have administrative jobs at John Deere.
Low taxes, they say, are one draw. Another is the feeling that things don’t change dramatically here. “We don’t have the big swings – political, financial, social,” Mr. Collins says.
Davenport and its neighbouring communities – referred to as the Quad Cities – totalling about half a million people on both the Iowa and Illinois sides of the Mississippi, have largely seen their economies and populations remain flat since a steep decline in manufacturing in the 1980s.
John Deere, headquartered on the Illinois side with factories in both states, remains the area’s largest employer. It has reported paying about US$750-million in tariffs this year and expects that to jump to US$1.1-billion in 2027. Canada’s retaliatory levies on farm equipment, meanwhile, threaten to drive its exports down. In recent years, the company has gone through a frenetic series of layoffs and recalls.
Arconic, which makes aluminum products in Bettendorf, Iowa, is another important industrial player. Over the past year, it has tried to make large metals purchases on the spot market in an apparent bid to mitigate the volatility caused by Mr. Trump’s levies.
The area’s history is inscribed on Davenport’s city centre. Stately 1920s commercial buildings harken back to the boom years, vacant lots remind of the bust, and hipster beer bars mark a 21st-century revitalization.
The relative success or failure at retaining people comes up in nearly every conversation.
Tracy Jones, 55, who recently retired as a court clerk in Rock Island, Ill., remembers when the International Harvester factory closed in 1986. Her father, who worked on the assembly line, had to take a job at one of the company’s other plants, 700 kilometres away in Springfield, Ohio. He lived between the two cities for a time, making the long drive to spend weekends with his family.
“He always used to tell me: ‘Every parent wants their children to do better than they did, and I’m fearful that your generation will be the first one that will not,’” Ms. Jones recalls in the local Democratic campaign office, where she’s been volunteering this autumn.
Her own grown children have both decamped to Texas − her son for graduate school near Dallas and her daughter for work at a shipping company in Austin. For a time, her son taught English as a second language at a community college in Davenport. But the job didn’t offer enough hours or health insurance.
Tracy Jones volunteers for the local Democratic campaign in Davenport.
In a scramble to hold Iowa, Mr. Trump last month announced a plan to revive its industrial glory days by building the country’s largest steel mill in the state’s southeast.
There is deep skepticism the project will ever come to fruition. It’s the latest iteration of a plan dating to 2007 in which Essar Global, an Indian multinational, has tried and failed to set up a plant at an iron ore mine in northern Minnesota. Now, the company is proposing to ship the ore some 860 kilometres to Iowa’s Lee County.
Ann Mohr, Mr. Mohr’s wife, points out that the mill would probably have to rely on immigrant workers, an irony given Mr. Trump’s mass deportation push.
“Who do they think is going to run this steel plant?” she says. “We already have a labour shortage in the state and we have an aging population and we don’t have young people who are staying.”
It’s certainly not the sort of promise that will win over Brittany Burmeister, 47, an independent voter who has backed candidates of both parties over the years. Since her time at business school, she’s viewed Mr. Trump as an incompetent manager. “I’ve never liked Trump ever, ever, ever, ever,” she says in the kitchen of her farmhouse.
Among the lessons the President apparently missed, she says, is that tariffs are inefficient and self-defeating. In her case, she rushed last year to get in an order for a grain vacuum from Guelph, Ont.-based Walinga to avoid levies.
“That’s Econ 101: Tariffs are not benefiting anyone, it’s just an extra cost,” she says. “It’s just so frustrating. The U.S. and Canada always had such a good relationship.”