Democratic U.S. House candidate Nikki Gronli has smartly amplified the voices of South Dakota beef producers in criticizing Donald Trump’s persistent favors to foreign beef, cornering her Republican opponent Marty Jackley into having to wanly oppose Trump’s dumb policy before changing the subject to dodge admitting that Trump is dumb and that maybe we need members of Congress who will protect their constituents from that dumbness.
Gronli should keep hammering on the Trump party’s failure to support American agriculture. As Politico reports, that’s the tack challengers are using in at least four other big-beef states to tighten their races with Trumpublicans:
“Our ranchers and our farmers keep getting kicked in the teeth, and we have politicians that keep telling us that everything’s great, that we’re the hottest country,” Dan Osborn, an independent running for Senate in Nebraska, said in an interview. “And to be quite frank, I’m pretty pissed off about it.”
Osborn’s state is one of the top four top cattle-producing states — along with Texas, Kansas and Iowa — all of which have more-competitive-than-expected Senate races this cycle. And Trump’s controversial plan to remove tariffs from 300,000 metric tons of imported beef, sold at 25 percent below current market prices, is doing Republicans no favors.
…Last week, during a debate at the Kansas State Fair, Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton slammed the import plan as “a slap in the face of all of our cattle ranchers,” earning a raucous response from fair-goers, and hit [GOP Sen. Roger] Marshall for “tepidly respond[ing] to it as opposed to shouting like hell that this is not okay.”
In Iowa’s agriculture-heavy first district, Democrats have been on the air since June with an ad hammering Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks for record-high beef prices” and other cost-of-living increases under the Trumpadministration. The Republicans who were already getting hammered for high prices before now are now hobbled by a proposed remedy — one that has infuriated their own base [Samuel Benson, “Farm-State Republicans Are Having a Cow over Trump’s Beef IMports as Election Day Approaches,” Politico, 2026.09.19].
Keep driving that wedge, Nikki! Trump’s beef import plan has done real damage to America’s beef market without getting any American a cheaper or better burger. Forcing Republicans to run from Trump and his stupidity further weakens Republicans with their rabid Trump base and improves the chances that the rest of the electorate will come to their senses and vote for Democrats and other good people not beholden to the destructive cult of Trumpersonality.