‘Go-It-Alone’
“His impulsive, go-it-alone approach to the issue has left them with an easily accessible and open door to push on,” said Ned Price, the director of policy and communications at National Security Action and a former national security spokesman in the Obama administration. “He has taken a complex issue and, in a sense, turned himself into the target — and a big one at that."
A poll published last week by the Monmouth University Polling Institute found that 62% of Americans expect U.S. consumers to bear most of the cost of the latest round of tariffs on Chinese goods. In addition, 47% of respondents think that Trump’s tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy. Only 25% said they would help.
Therefore, without policy prescriptions of their own, the candidates have mostly stuck to the playbook of blaming Trump.
“We need a president of the United States that’s going to stand up for American farmers, that’s going to stand up for American consumers and going to join with our allies to make sure that we have just and fair trade that works for everyone,” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said in Chariton, Iowa, last month.
But rural voters warned they are growing weary of the Democrats’ lack of specifics.
‘Eating Us Alive’
“I don’t know what the Democrats are thinking, but the farmers, the costs are eating us alive,” said Jeff Olson, a farmer in Winfield, Iowa, who said he’s barely breaking even. Olson, a former Republican who didn’t support Trump in 2016, said he won’t vote for Trump in 2020, but he is looking for more clarity from the Democrats.
Pam Johnson, a soybean farmer from outside Charles City, Iowa, said she, too, is eagerly awaiting the Democrats’ trade policy.
“It’s so important to us when 95 percent of the world’s population lives outside the United States that we get back into the game,” she said. “I’m not saying that we should not hold China accountable, but there are different ways to do that.”