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What Hovde’s Farm Bill gaffe says about the 2024 election

24 October 2024 at 10:15

Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Eric Hovde in the 2024 Senate campaign debate | Screenshot via Youtube

Eric Hovde doesn’t know much about the Farm Bill, he told the moderators of his debate with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, whom Hovde is running to replace. Investigative reporter Dan Bice called it “the worst moment” of the only debate between Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate candidates. Baldwin immediately cut an ad highlighting Hovde’s profession of ignorance.

Hovde says he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?” he griped to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna. McKenna was sympathetic. “Every debate is rigged against Republicans,” she said. Anyway, the Farm Bill, McKenna and Hovde agreed, is just a big boondoggle. “It’s a bill about food stamps,” McKenna said contemptuously. 

“It’s all for big corporations, food stamps, everything else,” Hovde added vaguely. “And by the way, Sen. Baldwin, I bet, wouldn’t know one-tenth of what’s in the bill.”

In fact, Baldwin wrote a number of provisions of the Senate’s Farm Bill framework, including dairy business innovation grants, protections for farmers who face a sudden drop in milk prices or increase in the cost of feed, mental health supports for agricultural communities, a federal program to track foreign investment in U.S. farmland, upgrades for rural drinking water infrastructure and funding for rural hospitals, child care and economic development.

In the debate, she said she was disappointed by the delay in passing a new Farm Bill. (Congress takes up a new Farm Bill every five years. Because the House and Senate failed to agree on the 2023 bill, the 2018 bill has been extended.) But deep cuts to federal food assistance in the House version are unacceptable, she added. 

This is the sort of nerdy policy discussion that made Baldwin the first Democrat to receive the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation in 20 years. But it doesn’t make for sexy talking points in the campaign

Hovde, as Erik Gunn reports, is running a campaign fashioned in the image of former President Donald Trump, who gave Hovde his “complete and total endorsement

His focus is on how “the American Dream is slipping away” and the country is in “decline” because of President Joe Biden’s “disastrous” stewardship of the economy and “the worst border crisis in our nation’s history.”

Unlike Baldwin, with her detailed policy proposals and long list of legislative accomplishments, Hovde is mostly running on a throw-the-bums-out mood of disaffection which appeals to Trump voters.

A lot of those voters are in rural parts of the state, where, as Hovde observed during the debate, you can see huge Trump and Hovde signs waving over farm fields along the highway

But those same areas have produced surprising margins for Baldwin, as split-ticket voters have repeatedly supported her, even as they cast their ballots for Republican presidential candidates. That’s because she regularly shows up to listen to them and gets deeply in the weeds on rural issues.

This year, like the presidential election in battleground Wisconsin, the Senate race is a tossup. No one knows how voters will weigh wonky policy proposals against outrage and showmanship. 

Nowhere is the disconnect between concrete policies and the politics of the current election more glaring than on the issue of immigration. Trump’s promised “mass deportation” would be a death blow to Wisconsin dairy farmers, removing 70% of the dairy industry’s labor force who are immigrants, mostly with no legal work authorization because Congress has not extended agricultural visas to year-round farm workers — including the people who milk the cows on Wisconsin dairies.

Baldwin has discussed that issue in public forums on the Farm Bill. But like other Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris in her campaign for president, she is not pushing back that hard against the Republican “border crisis” message. In the debate she focused on the importance of stopping fentanyl from crossing the border, not the degree to which Wisconsin farmers depend on undocumented immigrant labor. 

From a campaign perspective, Democrats have apparently decided that defending the immigrants who prop up so much of the U.S. economy is a losing strategy. As with the broader issue of the economy, including low unemployment, surging job growth and a dramatic recovery from the pandemic thanks in large part to the Biden administration’s aggressive investments (which, among other feats, cut child poverty in half while the nation experienced COVID lockdowns), Democrats are not swimming against the tide. They know people feel that prices are high and things aren’t going their way, and they don’t want to sound callous or out of tune by saying the economy is actually in good shape.

It’s up to voters to make up their own minds. As the Republicans say, are you better off than you were four years ago? Another question we’ll all have to answer: Do you think government policies like the Farm Bill can make things better or are you ready to throw a rock at the system and see what happens? The answer to that question will determine which radically different path we take in the future.

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Forget the lies and slander. Wisconsin dairy farmers know they need immigrant workers

7 October 2024 at 10:00
CAMBRIDGE, WI - APRIL 25: Cows walk from a barn after being milked on Hinchley's Dairy Farm on April 25, 2017 near Cambridge, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

CAMBRIDGE, WI - APRIL 25: Cows walk from a barn after being milked on Hinchley's Dairy Farm on April 25, 2017 near Cambridge, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

While Republican politicians were busy spreading lurid stories about immigrants bringing chaos, violence and economic harm to communities across the Midwest, organizers of last week’s World Dairy Expo were quietly adjusting their program to offer programs in Spanish for employees and managers who play a crucial role in the industry.

Workers from Mexico and other Latin American countries make up an estimated 70% of the labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms. Over the last several years, the annual dairy expo in Madison has been responding to the needs of these workers, as well as to visitors from Spanish-speaking countries around the world, with the “expo en español.”

On Wednesday afternoon Juan Quezada, director of training and development at Milk Source LLC, gave a lecture on leadership entirely in Spanish. (Other Spanish-language sessions this year concerned women in dairy, animal welfare and labor retention.) 

The meeting room inside the Alliant Center was full of Latino farm managers, some from as far away as Spain and Ecuador and others from nearby dairy operations in Wisconsin. Outside, the fairgrounds hosted people from 130 countries and more than 2,500 cows, exhibits showing off gleaming farm equipment, and aisles of food vendors.

The expo declined an offer to appear from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“We host an event for cows and people who care for cows and not for candidates,” Lisa Behnke, communications manager for World Dairy Expo, told Wisconsin State Farmer, who added that the same decision would apply to any partisan candidate. “We’re staying in our lane.”

But given Trump’s attacks on immigrants, and the promise of a “mass deportation” that, if it ever happened, would destroy the dairy industry overnight, the Republican presidential candidate would have been a particularly bad fit for the expo this year.

“We’ve seen a big population of Latinos coming to these events,” said Alison Pfau, bilingual regional dairy educator for the University of Wisconsin Extension, explaining the decision to offer programs in Spanish. 

It stands to reason that immigrants, who are the backbone of the dairy industry, are moving into leadership positions, training and supervising workers, keeping operations running smoothly, becoming trusted managers on farms that lean heavily on them to survive.

In his lecture, Quezada told his own story, how he moved up from milking cows to management after a long apprenticeship. He described how he got a big break one day, while leading a tour of international visitors on the large farm where he was working. As he was giving the tour, he stopped now and then to pick up bits of garbage. When the tour was over, a farm manager from Europe asked if he would like to work overseas. His attention to detail and care for the little aspects of the job caught his prospective employer’s eye and led to his next job in Denmark. “Thanks to the garbage, I achieved one of my dreams,” he declared. Eventually, Quezada made it back to Wisconsin to work at Milk Source, the largest single milk-producer in Wisconsin. 

It was one of many anecdotes about leadership qualities — honesty, punctuality, respect — that Quezada expounded on to his audience, mostly broad-shouldered Latino men wearing baseball caps, who nodded in agreement.

How many immigrant workers have come to this country and arrived in our state following Quezada’s path, I wondered — working hard, keeping their heads down and slowly becoming an indispensable part of our economy and society?

Last week the Immigration Research Initiative in New York and the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., co-released a one-page infographic showing how immigration benefits the U.S. economy.

Together, immigrant workers and business owners generated $4.8 trillion in economic output in the U.S. in 2022, the groups reported.

In addition to their outsized role in agriculture, immigrants, who make up 14% of the U.S. population, are 27% of janitors, 37% of construction laborers, 47% of maids and 46% of software developers.

On the rooftops of houses, above the Trump/Vance signs displayed in some of my neighbors’ yards, teams of Latino workers have been busy lately, hammering away to Reggeaton music as they replace hail-damaged roof tiles. It’s astounding how much work is getting done by immigrants even as the toxicity of anti-immigrant rhetoric keeps ramping up. 

“When immigrants move to the United States, the economy grows,” the Immigration Research Initiative and EPI researchers found. “That doesn’t mean fewer jobs; it means more jobs: there are more consumers, more workers and more business owners. Study after study shows there is no fixed number of jobs in the economy. Immigration creates opportunities that benefit U.S.-born workers, too.”

Quezada’s lecture emphasized both the importance of hard work — an easy sell to his audience, which knows a lot about that topic — and the responsibilities that come with leadership. Leadership means setting an example, he told the group. It means thinking about how your speech and actions create a positive or negative atmosphere for others. It means listening well, inspiring people to follow your example, being consistent by saying hello every day. 

When he asked for examples of leadership qualities from audience members, they offered more: respect, good communication skills, the ability to control your emotions.

Quezada told a story about how he lost his temper once, the night before he was about to be promoted to a new job. A cow gave birth unexpectedly and he had to stay in the barn late on a Sunday night. Angrily, he kicked the wall, only to find that his employer was standing behind him. He could have lost his promotion, he said. He told the story to illustrate another quality of good leaders: integrity — doing the right thing even when you think no one is watching. 

I can think of a few political leaders who would benefit from Quezada’s lessons in leadership. But they’d need a translator to help them understand.

Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the total amount immigrants contribute to U.S. GDP, based on a draft of the Immigration Research Initiative report that was later corrected.

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