For Republicans to take control of the United States Senate after the midterm elections, they need to gain a net of just one seat. Yet several election modelers give the Democrats at least a two-thirds chance to keep control.
Why have the GOP’s Senate chances been relegated to a 1-in-3 shot? Because, with Dr. Mehmet Oz running poorly in his attempt to keep Pennsylvania’s seat out of Democratic hands, Republicans have only one solid geographic path to victory: flipping both Nevada and Georgia. Those are the only two states where the Republican challenger is running neck-and-neck with a Democratic incumbent.
The Republican map has shrunk with Arizona’s Blake Masters trailing Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly by six percentage points, and New Hampshire’s Don Bolduc down eight points against Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan, according to RealClearPolitics poll averages. Sen. Rick Scott, who heads the Republicans’ national Senate campaign arm, not too long ago spoke optimistically of expanding the map into Colorado, Connecticut, and Washington State, but that looks fantastical at the moment.
Granted, we should be careful not to treat poll numbers as gospel, especially considering the 2020 Senate elections featured some very big whiffs. Maine’s Susan Collins didn’t lead in a single autumn survey yet won by nearly nine percentage points. Montana polls suggested a tight Senate race, but Steve Daines coasted to a 10-point victory. North Carolina’s Cal Cunningham was up by 2.6 points in the final RCP average, but Thom Tillis came out on top by 1.8 points.
But the proof of the pudding is in the spending. The Super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last week pulled out of Arizona, presumably seeing little hope for a candidate who once said convicted domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski has “a lot of insight there that is correct.” Democrats in Arizona have outspent Republicans 2-to-1, and Kelly ads have aired four times more frequently than Masters ads.
McConnell’s Super PAC has not yet abandoned Bolduc, but he only became the nominee on Sept. 13. He will likely have to narrow the poll gap soon to maintain national party support.
Republicans have also not given up on Oz. Some mid-summer polls showed the Democratic nominee John Fetterman with leads between nine and 13 points, but now holds a more modest 4.2 point lead in the RCP average.
Oz, who survived a bruising primary, appears to have consolidated Republican support. But Oz has not cut into Fetterman’s level of support, nor has he endeared himself to voters. After the hits he took in the primary as a creature of Hollywood, Fetterman’s campaign pilloried him as a creature of New Jersey. In a recent Muhlenberg College/Morning Call poll, Oz had an atrocious 29% favorable rating, with 53% of respondents holding an unfavorable impression. Fetterman, in contrast, was slightly above water, 44% favorable and 41% unfavorable.
Nevertheless, Republicans have reason to stick by Oz. Fetterman’s health following his May stroke remains a political wild card. In a CBS News/YouGov poll, 59% said Fetterman is “in good enough health to serve in public office.” But we can’t rule out the possibility that something could happen in a debate or on the campaign trail which could alter those numbers. Furthermore, as I noted above, taking Pennsylvania off the gameboard makes the Republican battle twice as steep, requiring wins in both remaining competitive contests. So Republicans aren’t going to rush to surrender the Keystone State.
Meanwhile, Democrats have done a better job expanding their map. Mandela Barnes’ early lead versus Wisconsin’s incumbent Republican Ron Johnson has vanished following a barrage of ads accusing him of being a “Defund-the-Police Democrat” who has paroled “murderers” and “child rapists.” (Oz’s campaign is similarly trying to use Fetterman’s record chairing the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons as fodder for attacks.) But Johnson’s RCP lead is a spare 1.5 points, keeping Barnes in the mix. Plus, Democrats are running only two points behind in Ohio and North Carolina, and about three points in Florida, with candidates who are more moderate than Fetterman and Barnes.
All of these races may be stretches, but they give Democrats multiple geographic paths for avoiding a net loss of Senate seats and retaining control.
In all likelihood, the Republicans’ majority hopes rest on the shoulders of Nevada’s Adam Laxalt and Georgia’s Herschel Walker. Laxalt has the much stronger political pedigree, for better or worse. His father Paul Laxalt was a longtime fixture in Nevada politics, a popular governor and senator. Adam’s own record is more mixed: while he won the attorney general’s race in 2014, he lost the gubernatorial election four years later.
While the pro-life Laxalt may prove too conservative for the light blue, libertine Silver State, he knows what it is like to run statewide, which gives Republican leaders some comfort with his electoral prospects. Walker, on the other hand, is a former football star who has never run for office before. He has made a series of bewildering comments on the campaign trail. And Democrats are airing ads with a clip of Walker admitting he “put a gun to [the] head” of his ex-wife. Despite those attacks, the race is effectively tied in the polls, so Walker could pull it off. But one imagines Republican leaders can’t be thrilled that their majority depends on the political resilience of a scandal-tarred political novice.
We can’t know which way the Senate will go in November. But we do know the Republican path to victory is much narrower than it had to be.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
