John Evich has voted for President Donald Trump three times, convinced he was the candidate who would fight for his line of work. These days, the commercial fisherman, who works the waters of Washington and Alaska, is worn down by the mounting cost of doing business at sea: fuel prices keep climbing, and trade hostilities with Canada are jeopardizing the market for the crabs he pulls off the ocean floor.

“If somebody came along that was going to do a better job, I would vote for them in a heartbeat,” Evich said.

His frustration, echoed throughout the U.S. seafood industry, has become another piece of the political puzzle working against Trump in the midterm elections. Discontent among commercial fishermen could inflict collateral damage on Republicans in competitive races in Washington, Alaska and Maine.

“Having those costs be so much higher this year has really undermined the viability of some of our fisheries,” said Linda Behnken, an Alaska fisherman.

A courtship under strain

Trump set out to make an ally of the fleet during his first term, expanding fishing territory, pursuing aggressive trade moves and cutting regulations on the water. He resumed the effort after his second election.

But one strand of his government downsizing campaign — cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which regulates fisheries — has left the agency slower to respond to the industry’s needs, fishermen said. Staff reductions have also forced the agency to scale back the weather balloons it uses to gather data that fishermen rely on; those balloon observations feed the forecast models behind the marine weather reports crews consult before sailing.

Fuel costs have crept upward during the war with Iran as well, pushing diesel into the $6-per-gallon range from less than $4 a year ago — a heavy burden for a diesel-dependent industry, where fuel bills accrue with every hour a vessel spends under way. At the same time, the trade war with Canada has complicated the American seafood industry’s relationship with a country it has long been intertwined with, fishermen said.

The administration has kept trying to win fishermen over with industry-friendly moves, including an early September promise to relieve additional regulatory burdens in response to a 2025 executive order. Some of the industry’s key states — Alaska, Washington and Maine — matter to Trump politically this year because of competitive House and Senate races. But support on the water could be waning.

“I’m for whatever has to happen for the greater good in the long run for my family and my country,” Evich said.

A natural ally, disrupted

Trump has positioned himself as a pro-fishing president since his first term, when one of his signature moves for the industry was rolling back Obama-era fishing restrictions at Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument off the New England coast. President Joe Biden later restored the protections, and Trump then removed them again.

On paper, the industry should be a natural constituency for Trump. A 2026 NOAA survey of commercial fishing crews found that 70% thought fishing rules were too restrictive, and the president has styled himself an enemy of bureaucracy and red tape.

In recent months, though, Trump has brought disruption to an industry that can ill afford it, said John Sackton, founder of SeafoodNews.com and a longtime industry analyst. Sackton said he sees a sector eager to “turn the page” on the administration.

“Now what’s happened is that there has been this unbelievable wave of disruption from everything — targeting NOAA and fisheries, science and even weather reporting that people rely on,” Sackton said, citing tariffs and the rising cost of doing business among the problems Trump has delivered to the industry.

Pain at the dock

The price of fuel is “one of the most immediate pressures on us as commercial fishermen,” said Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association in New York. Nearly the entire U.S. commercial fleet runs on marine diesel, making soaring fuel costs a burden the industry cannot avoid. At times, she said, prices are now so high that fishermen cannot afford to leave the dock at all.

“Actual dockside marine-fuel prices vary, but the magnitude of the increase is undeniable. It determines whether a trip is economically viable, what the crew earns and whether necessary vessel maintenance can be performed,” Brady said.

In Rhode Island, Chris Brown, who targets species such as fluke and squid out of Point Judith, put it more bluntly.

“It’s huge. It’s crazy. Thank you, Donald Trump,” he said sarcastically.

The Canada problem

The trade war with Canada is a more tangled affair. Canada exempted U.S. fish and seafood products from the counter-tariffs it imposed after the U.S. placed tariffs on Canadian goods. Before that exemption, Patricearron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, warned that U.S. lobstermen risked becoming “collateral damage in a broader trade dispute.”

Unease among fishermen persists, in part because Canada is the U.S.’s largest seafood trading partner. The U.S. also relies on Canada for seafood processing and for the manufacture of fishing gear. For some species, such as lobster and salmon, American and Canadian crews work close to one another — or in the very same waters.

A trade war with such a key partner could carry negative consequences for the fishing industry, said Steve Train, a lobster fisherman from Long Island, Maine, who describes himself as a “right-leaning centrist” and has voted Republican more often than Democrat.

“I get the standing up to a bully concept, but too many people will be caught in the middle of this,” Train said. “Both sides need to reconsider these tariffs, and they need to reconsider soon.”

Deep cuts at NOAA

NOAA Fisheries, the arm of the agency tasked with overseeing commercial fishing, faces a budget cut of more than 40% in the fiscal 2027 budget proposal. The reduction would hit science programs, fisheries management and data collection. As a budget proposal rather than enacted law, the figure now moves to Congress, where the appropriations process will set final funding levels.

Those cutbacks trickle down to fishermen and translate into a lack of fishing opportunities, Sackton said. Some in the industry also have the impression that NOAA is too understaffed to regulate fisheries in a timely fashion, he added.

In Sitka, Alaska, Behnken said the administration’s cutbacks at NOAA have made life harder for her and others who depend on the agency. She has deep empathy for the workers who remain, saying they are “doing the work of three people, particularly at the weather service,” but the situation is still frustrating for fishermen.

“It’s hard to retain good people when their future at the organization is that uncertain,” said Behnken, executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.

This story was originally published on Fortune.