There are not enough farmers, that is to say farm owners, to make any sort of significant difference in election outcomes, even in the most agricultural states and areas. Farm owners vote about the same way that owners of every kind of business vote. They skew Republican. Here, in an intensely agricultural area, it's about 60/40 Republican at the most, sometimes 55/45. Trump got some 30,000 votes in the tri-county area here, all of it agricultural. Yet, there are only about 300 growers, 300 actual farm owners.
Even in Western Nebraska, there aren't enough farmers to have a significant effect on elections. Farm families are less than 2% of the U.S. population. How do we determine who is and who is not a farmer? From the USDA: "a farm is defined as any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year." Pretty broad.
J D Vance was here speaking in front of a large crowd and talking smack about agriculture. Trump was going to help the farmers, he said, by rounding up the immigrants and instituting tariffs. Say what?? Total insanity. That would not help farmers. Yet the crowd roared its approval. Now, how many farm owners were actually in that crowd? Very few, a handful at most.
What explains that is what I call the Walter Mitty effect - people who fantasize about rugged he-man stereotypes. The Republicans play on this to great effect. Reagan on horseback, Bush with his phony ranch, Trump with all his rugged he-man stereotype images. But it is not really ranchers, farmers, lumberjacks, fishermen, truckers, warriors, pioneers who vote for Trump or vote for the Republicans. It's people who identify with that imagery, symbolic archetypes rather than the actual people doing the work.
That is a component of a long cultural tradition that celebrates frontier self-reliance and rugged individualism. Don't be fooled. It is all a ruse, and Republicans love to portray Democrats as being opposed to all these true blue all-Americans images. This is symbolic class politics, where people vote for an imagined version of themselves, not their actual economic role - the truck driver who identifies with the cowboy; the suburbanite who identifies with the farmer; the office worker who identifies with the warrior. Political marketing leans on these archetypes constantly.
Agricultural identity has far more political power than actual farmers do. There is a long history of this in US politics: frontier mythology, the “yeoman farmer” ideal from Jefferson, cowboy imagery in 20th-century politics, military/pioneer masculinity in campaign branding. Actual farmers are a tiny demographic, but the symbolic farmer is enormous in American culture.
Farm subsidies are and always were intended to be of benefit to one and only one special interest group, the eaters. The public agriculture infrastructure represents a milestone in progressive government programs and initiatives, going back to the Morrill Act of 1862, and it should be supported by all Democrats - the Land Grant colleges, cooperative extension services, the USDA, the state public health and safety regulations and departments of agriculture, the farm credit system. Farm programs account for less than one-half of 1% of the total U.S. budget. The system was designed to stabilize food supply for society as a whole.
Historically public agriculture infrastructure was about stabilizing food supply, preventing price collapse, maintaining rural infrastructure, protecting national food security. It’s basically public food policy, not farmer charity.
Do a handful of wealthy people, do big operators, do people who are not even farmers, game the system? Yes, of course. This is the United States.
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