Vice President JD Vance did not utter the word “tariffs” a single time during his upbeat speech at a Plover, Wisconsin, machining plant Thursday. The visit, aimed at shoring up vulnerable Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden ahead of the 2026 midterms, was part of a post-State of the Union victory lap Vance is taking to market the so-called Golden Age of prosperity Trump claims he and the Republicans have delivered to rural and blue-collar voters.It’s a tough sell. The latest Marquette University Law School poll, released the day before Vance parachuted into Wisconsin, shows Trump hitting a second-term low with Wisconsin voters, with 44 percent saying they approve of the job he’s doing and 54 percent saying they don’t approve. Across partisan affiliations, the rising cost of living is voters’ No. 1 concern, while 55 percent of respondents told pollsters tariffs are hurting Wisconsin farmers. Manufacturers are not happy, either.“I can tell you from my experience running our company, from everyone I talk to in my networks — 95 percent of people in manufacturing — 99 percent do not support the tariffs,” said Sachin Shivaram, CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, a Wisconsin-based company with locations across the Midwest.Shivaram spoke on a press call with Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin ahead of Vance’s speech Thursday. Many business owners, he said, are afraid to publicly share their criticisms of the Trump administration. When he meets other leaders of manufacturing companies in boardrooms, he said, “It’s like, look, we can’t say anything about how dumb the tariff policy is, because we’re going to be the next one whacked on X.” But, he added, “it’s costing all of them, all of us, a lot of money.”Tariffs have caused “chaos and uncertainty” for businesses, agreed Kyle LaFond, owner and founder of American Provenance and Natural Contract Manufacturing, a small business that makes personal care products. “Last year, when these tariffs were first instituted, I absorbed those costs as much as possible. I did that for about eight months,” LaFond said. “But that is not a sustainable business practice.” Ultimately, he said, businesses have to pass along the cost to their customers: “Tariffs are just attacks on the American consumer.” Trump's failure to deliver the economic miracle he advertised, along with devastating cuts to health care and the safety net, pose a looming problem for Republicans ahead of the midterms. The solution they’ve hit on is a combination of bluster, bullying and straight-up lies.There’s a reason slim majorities of Wisconsin voters chose Trump in 2016 and 2024. Vance put his finger on it in his speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee: “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.”Wisconsin manufacturing workers and farmers suffered tremendously from global trade deals. Democrats and Republicans alike brushed aside their pain and tried to tell them that the booming stock market and increasing corporate profits were worth the crashing prices and job losses. Never mind the communities ruined and all the families that fell out of the middle class.Trump and Vance spoke to those voters. In his convention speech, Vance cleverly tied global trade deals supported by both political parties to immigration: “Now, thanks to these policies that Biden and other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us,” he said, “our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor.”But the immigrants who make up 70 percent of the labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms did not drive the collapse of Wisconsin’s small-farm economy. They, too, were displaced by globalization that drove down prices and accelerated a “get big or get out” economy that has taken a heavy toll on working people on both sides of the border. The arrival of immigrants willing to work long hours for low pay on farms that were forced to expand rapidly to stay afloat was a blessing to farmers who simply couldn’t find American workers to fill those jobs.Today’s increasingly virulent, demagogic attacks on those hardworking immigrants should make everyone queasy. Alex Jacquez, a former White House economic official in the Biden administration who also worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, sees Vance’s rise as a big win for the populist right. Vance’s criticism of global trade deals that hollowed out American manufacturing, and his appeal to the “forgotten” American workers who have never recovered from outsourcing, struck a nerve with voters across the industrial Midwest.