Arkansas farmers, long a reliable voting bloc for Sen. Tom Cotton and other Natural State conservatives, are on the hook for $343 million in war-related price increases courtesy of D.C. Republicans’ ongoing support of the Iran war and other U.S. entanglements in the Middle East.
That figure, damaging as it should be for Cotton, comes not from his hard-charging, farmer-courting Democratic opponent Hallie Shoffner, but from official state channels.
An analysis out last week from the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture traces surging fuel and fertilizer costs to the ongoing shitshow in the Strait of Hormuz, which has been blocked off and on since early March as President Donald Trump picks a war with Iran for some reason nobody can really explain, with Cotton egging him on.
Cotton has long spent far more energy snarling at his foreign foes than serving his Arkansas constituents. He’s used the national platform Arkansas voters gave him by sending him to Washington to attack China, Iran, Gaza and even American citizens exercising their 1A rights.
It’s true that business is booming for the defense contractors who build the bombs that dance in Cotton’s head like sugarplums. And it’s true an increasing number of Arkansans work in the factories where these munitions, likely slated to be used to kill Palestinian babies or Iranian schoolgirls, are made. So perhaps those Arkansas Republican votes make some sense, just from a job-security standpoint.
But farmers, whose dependence on welfare handouts to keep them afloat has only ramped up in the Trump era? Where has their support for Cotton gotten them?
If Arkansas farmers go blood red again Nov. 3, which they’ve reliably done for decades now, it’ll be hard to feel much sympathy the next time they complain of high diesel prices, defunct soybean markets and threats to their labor force thanks to Republicans’ anti-immigration policies. They’re simply getting what they voted for.