Does a Bigger Bailout Buy More Loyalty? Farmers Say No

The intensifying U.S.-China Trade War has contributed to an immense loss of export markets for farmers. Meanwhile, the Iran War continues to heighten fuel and fertilizer costs. With farmers in jeopardy and midterms on the horizon, pundits and analysts alike are looking to assess how economic hardship may shape rural electoral engagement.

To cushion these mounting pressures, the Trump administration has relied on the 2025 Emergency Commodity Assistance Program (ECAP) to support the agricultural sector. ECAP provides large-scale direct payments to producers experiencing weak commodity prices and elevated input costs. Complementing this, the existing Agriculture Risk Coverage program (ARC) functions as a safety-net program that triggers payments when actual farm revenues fall below established benchmark guarantees. These programs matter not only as economic stabilizers, but also as political tools and in rural America. It is therefore important to understand whether this or future economic assistance can shore up farmer’s support for the Republican party.

This question sits at the center of Jake Jares and Neil Malhotra’s recent publication. Drawing on evidence from the first Trump Administration’s attempt to stem the cost of trade war, the Market Facilitation Program (MFP), the authors examine how exposure to trade shocks and subsequent government assistance influences farmers’ political participation and voting behavior. The authors leveraged variation in the MFP’s payment structure which, due to idiosyncrasies in program design, resulted in substantially different compensation levels across farmers based solely on their 2018 crop portfolios, with some producers undercompensated for tariff induced losses while others were significantly overcompensated. Using a sample of more than 165,000 affected voters, the authors link variation in net MFP benefits to two primary outcomes: turnout in the 2018 midterm elections and campaign contribution behavior in the months following the trade shock. This design allows for an assessment of how differential exposure to economic harm and subsequent federal relief translates into measurable changes in political participation and donor behavior.

Jares and Malhotra find that, contrary to expectations, variation in policy generosity had little to no meaningful effect on political participation. While improved compensation under the MFP, which provided direct payments to U.S. farmers to offset income losses caused by Chinese retaliatory tariffs, modestly increased farmers’ perceptions that the policy was helpful, it did not translate into statistically significant changes in turnout or campaign contributions. Among Republican farmers—the primary focus of the analysis—moving from the 25% to the 75% percentile of net benefits from the MFP resulted in only a 0.3 percentage point increase in turnout, a substantively negligible effect. Non-Republican farmers similarly showed no meaningful changes in political engagement if provided with more generous assistance, indicating that relief outcomes did not differentially mobilize or demobilize any partisan group.

Additionally, no evidence exemplifies that improved compensation influenced campaign contribution behavior in either direction, with effects on Republican and Democratic giving effectively indistinguishable from zero. Even when accounting for prior turnout history, the results remain stable, suggesting that ceiling effects are unlikely to explain the null findings.

The authors further examine how political engagement evolved over different phases of the trade war to better isolate the effects of exposure to both the trade war shock and ameliorative policies. First, comparing the voting patterns of farmers and demographically similar non-farmers, their results suggest that acute exposure to the trade war itself motivated farmers to vote in the 2018 midterm election. On average, Republican farmers’ turnout was 1.2 percentage points higher than comparable non-farmers who did not experience the trade war directly, while Democratic farmer’s turnout was 1.7 higher. Returning to campaign contributions, the authors find that in the early months of the trade war, before retaliatory tariffs were imposed on US agriculture, there were no statistically significant or substantively large differences in contribution behavior between farmers and comparable non-farmers. Following the June 15 tariff escalation and China’s retaliatory measures, crop futures prices fell sharply. However, this economic disruption did not immediately translate into changes in political contributions among either Republican or Democratic farmers. Similarly, the announcement of a $12 billion relief package on July 24 produced little observable response in donation behavior in the short run. More pronounced, though still modest, changes only emerge after MFP benefit rates are announced on August 27, and enrollment begins in early September. At that point, farmers with different political backgrounds show small but statistically significant increases in Republican-leaning contributions, while Democratic farmers show no meaningful shifts.

The largely null results are important because they suggest that even sizable variation in policy outcomes may have limited effects on political mobilization. Taken together, these findings advance two key strands of political science research: one on economic voting and responsiveness to government policy, and another on political mobilization through distributive benefits. The authors conclude that political engagement is shaped less by the magnitude of individual compensation and more by the broader visibility and salience of the policy environment, particularly the Trade War itself and the government’s response to it.

More broadly, the results challenge the idea that incumbent parties can reliably increase electoral participation among their base simply by delivering favorable economic policy outcomes by compensating economic losers. Instead, they suggest that the political effects of policy are more limited and contingent than often assumed.