Trump’s ‘betrayal’ of America’s heartland will cost him

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The Republicans have not lost a Senate seat in Kansas for almost a century. The last time was during the farm foreclosures of the Great Depression in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt crushed Herbert Hoover in a tectonic landslide.

“I don’t want to be a president with a depression on his résumé. I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover,” said Donald Trump in June, explaining why he was again pulling back from talk of annihilating Iran.

But Hoover is what he risks becoming across the Prairies, where the Iran war has pushed farmers to the brink and a flock of Trump 2.0 chickens are coming home to roost.

The Cook Political Report says a once rock-solid Republican Senate seat in Kansas is starting to look like a “dead heat” in the midterms. The Democratic rival was ahead in the last two polls. RealClearPolitics polling has moved neighbouring Nebraska from “lean Republican” to “toss-up”.

Iowa’s Republican senate candidate is eight points behind in the latest poll. She is calling for a “successful and immediate” end to the war in Iran – a contradiction in terms and one that also confounds the White House. Trump announced a subsidised $US15 billion ($21.6 billion) steel plant in Iowa to try to save the seat.

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Stephen BartholomeuszSenior business columnist

Senior business columnist

The US constitutional quirk is that agrarian states are vastly overweighted in the Senate due to the Connecticut Compromise of 1787. What happens to them will determine whether Trump loses control of both chambers of Congress in five weeks.

It will determine whether he succeeds in breaking America’s public and private institutions and establishing, perhaps irreversibly, an authoritarian, winner-takes-all, clan-based state in alliance with a hubristic tech oligarchy.

It will tell the world whether the American people are finally going to........

© Brisbane Times