Sep.21

electoral-vote.com

Dem 52

Ties 4

GOP 44

Republican Candidates Have a Beef with Trump

You know, we don't plan out these days where every item is basically "What the heck is Donald Trump thinking?" We just go where the news leads. And since there are so many occasions where Trump's thinking is questionable at best, we sometimes end up with days full of items like these.

Anyhow, Trump's recently unveiled beef policy was ill-considered and impolitic, and now it's coming back to bite Republicans in the rump roast. As a reminder, the President wanted to combat high food prices. So, he decided to lift all tariffs on beef. This means that American beef producers, who are accustomed to a pretty high level of protectionism, are now facing lots of competition from foreign beef, which might not be as safe or as high quality.

The reason this was impolitic comes straight out of Politics 101. Americans are being hit hard by higher prices for all kinds of daily essentials. It is improbable that a small-to-moderate change in the cost of any one of those essentials (except maybe gasoline) is going to win many (or any) voters back into the Republican fold. On the other hand, if a politician undermines an industry, then the people in that industry, not to mention the people in associated industries, are going to quickly become single-issue voters. That will absolutely take people out of the Republican fold, particularly since ranchers tend to be members of the red team.

In other words, Trump made a smallish number of people very unhappy in exchange for making a larger number of people a (very) little bit happier. That kind of math rarely works out well for the party in power, and it's definitely not working out well in this case. This is giving Democratic candidates for office the potential to win over voters that would otherwise be out of reach.

Consider, for example, the top 10 beef-producing states by volume:

To (basically) repeat what we did above, looking at this year's U.S. Senate races:

• Kansas and Texas are red states where the Democrat is leading in the polls
• Iowa and Nebraska are red states where the Republican is tied in the polls with their main challenger
• Oklahoma and South Dakota are red states where the Republican is leading in the polls
• Colorado is a blue state where the Democrat is leading in the polls
• California, Missouri and Wisconsin don't have Senate elections this year

So, of the six states here that would usually be safe for the Republicans, four of them appear to be in play. That includes all of the top-three beef-producing states. If you prefer to list states by percentage of agricultural sales that are in beef, then the top five are Texas (15.5%), Kansas (13.6%), Nebraska (12.2%), Iowa (5.0%) and Colorado (4.7%). The latter is lost to the Republicans anyhow, the other four are all in in play. Remember what we wrote about the Trump policy being impolitic?

Dan Osborn (I), running in Nebraska, particularly senses an opportunity here, for obvious reasons. Late last week, he unveiled a new ad that is full of corny—well, OK, meaty—puns:

Here's the transcription, if you don't care to watch:

This is Argentinian beef. This is Nebraska beef. In Washington, they give this [Argentinian] beef discounts. That hurts our farmers. This Congress, it's too chicken to stand up to the corporations who bought them off. In this Nebraskan, they'll meet their match. I'll cut the pork. It's wasting our money, making them rich. I'll take on the coastal shrimps in both parties. I'm Dan Osborn, a lifelong independent, un-bought—which is rare, but that's just how I like it. I approve this message.

The coastal shrimps in question are Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Osborn's opponent Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE), which serves to burnish Osborn's independent credentials. And you can bet dollars-to-donuts that Pelosi is 100% OK with it, if that's what it takes for Osborn to win. Unlike certain other coastal types with shrimpy hands. Anyhow, the ad's humor probably wouldn't go over well in, say, California, but we assume Osborn knows his audience in Nebraska. And he certainly knows how to take this beef tariff and turn it into filet mignon. (Z)