Backlash to Trump Agenda Could Begin in His Rural Base

Trouble ahead in Trump country? Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images

A lot of the reaction to Donald Trump’s 2024-election victory has treated his campaign as successfully expanding a base of support in small-town, rural, and exurban America into more historically Democratic suburban and even urban turf, thus creating a potential majority coalition with some staying power. That makes a lot of sense. But unfortunately for Trump and his party, the agenda they plan to pursue in 2025, unless it undergoes some serious revisions, includes some nasty surprises for a lot of his most avid supporters, particularly in agricultural segments of the deep-red heartland.

As Ronald Brownstein observes in The Atlantic, the combination of steep tariffs, the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, major cuts in federal health-care programs like Medicaid, and attacks on funding for public schools could together produce a quadruple whammy for many residents of small-town and rural America. Tariffs (big across-the-board increases in duties that will shrink overseas markets for agricultural goods by producing retaliatory barriers to U.S. exports) and immigration initiatives (depriving agribusinesses of a big portion of their workforce) could hit Trump country hard and quickly:

A recent attempt to model how Trump’s tariff and mass-deportation plans would affect agricultural producers found a devastating combined impact. In a scenario where Trump both imposes the tariffs he’s threatened and succeeds at deporting a large number of immigrants, the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics has forecast that by 2028, agricultural exports could fall by nearly half and total agricultural output would decline by a sixth. Mass deportation, the institute projected, would reduce the workforce for agricultural production more than for any other economic sector. 

The last time Trump was in office with Republicans controlling Congress, the GOP tried to engineer a major reduction in federal health-care services and assistance. It failed, but if the second time is the charm, the impact on less urban communities could be dramatic, notes Brownstein:

Retrenching federal spending on Medicaid and the ACA remains a priority for congressional Republicans. Trump has consistently excluded Medicaid when he’s pledged not to seek cuts in the other biggest federal safety-net programs, Social Security and Medicare. The Republican Study Committee, a prominent organization of House conservatives, called in its latest proposed budget for converting Medicaid and ACA subsidies into block grants to states and then cutting them by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, more than four times the scale of cuts passed by the House in its 2017 bill …

Rural places would be especially vulnerable to cuts anywhere near the level that Republicans are discussing. Rural residents tend to be older and poorer, and face more chronic health problems. Rural employers are less likely to offer health insurance, which means that Medicaid provides coverage for a larger share of working-age adults in small towns: Multiple studies have found that about a fifth of rural residents rely on Medicaid, compared with less than a sixth in urban areas. Nearly half of all children in rural areas receive health coverage through the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program launched during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Medicaid is also a key resource for treating the many rural and small-town victims of opioid addiction and for keeping financially stressed rural hospitals functioning.

The Trump-GOP scheme to promote “parental rights” in education by voucherizing assistance and diverting funds from public to private schools will also have a disproportionate effect on communities that can’t support the array of options “choice” fans love to celebrate. That’s why even many very conservative, nonurban voters have opposed school-voucher ballot initiatives.

Add it all up and there’s a lot to dislike in Trump 2.0 for many of the rural and small-town voters who supported him even more strongly in 2024 than in 2016 and 2020. Yes, these same voters may connect with the GOP on culture-war issues and hostility to “coastal elites.” As one political scientist specializing in rural voters told Brownstein, “The truth is that the disdain for the Democratic Party is decades in the making and deep in rural America.” But it’s also true that rural “populists” have displayed little tolerance in the past for politicians who don’t pay attention to their unique economic problems. Farm-based voter “backlashes” against the policies of governing parties can be found in every epoch of American history and have been particularly troublesome to Republicans who have pursued protectionist trade measures and austere federal budgets. MAGA folk are understandably excited about opportunities to expand their movement’s reach during Trump’s second term. But they best be careful about policies that could alienate the voters they think they already have.