(Zero Hedge)—Zohran Mamdani rode a wave of progressive enthusiasm and sweeping promises to become the Mayor of New York City.
Now, as he closes in on his first hundred days in office, he’s learning that governing is a lot harder than campaigning, and a new poll suggests New Yorkers are starting to be skeptical about what they voted for.
Some of Mamdani’s campaign promises won’t be fulfilled because Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to subsidize them. Earlier this year, snow and trash removal problems became major issues, as residents were forced to endure eight-foot-high piles of garbage on the street and rat infestations, all while the area around Gracie Mansion was kept perfectly clean. The brutal winter also resulted in a cold-related death toll of 29. These kinds of crises test political leaders quickly, and he failed.
Then came Monday, when Mamdani held a public event to congratulate himself for New York City filing its 100,000th pothole since he took office in January.
The reaction was swift and unkind.
“Taking credit for filling potholes is like taking credit for changing a lightbulb. It’s what you’re supposed to do,” scoffed Councilman Frank Morano (R-Staten Island) told The New York Post.
A Marist College survey released Wednesday puts Madani’s approval rating at 48% — a number that tells an incomplete story, but not a flattering one.
Mamdani won his election in November with just over 50% of the vote, with Andrew Cuomo coming in second at 41.6% and Curtis Sliwa at 7%.
Clearly, Mamdani is struggling to convince even progressive voters who didn’t vote for him that he’s doing a good job.
But the numbers are even more devastating when you add more context.
Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams had a 61% approval rating at the same point in his term, proving that Mamdani is having a harder time convincing New Yorkers he’s doing a good job than his predecessor did.
The Marist poll, conducted March 26-31 among 1,454 New York City adults with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points, reveals a city that remains skeptical but is still forming its verdict. While 30% disapprove of Mamdani’s performance. 23% remain undecided — a number that Marist polling director Lee Miringoff flagged as a meaningful vulnerability. “There are a lot of people still on the fence. The jury is out,” Miringoff told The New York Post.
The sharpest drag on Mamdani’s numbers comes from a specific and politically significant corner of the electorate: Jewish voters. Only 38% of Jewish residents view Mamdani favorably, while 55% view him unfavorably, putting him underwater with Jewish New Yorkers by 17 points. They are the only religious group in the poll giving him a net-negative rating.
Miringoff noted Mamdani’s continued unpopularity in this community directly.
“Mamdani is going to have to pass the test of time with the Jewish community,” he said.
“Jews are the voters least likely religious group to give Mamdani the benefit of the doubt.”
It’s easy to understand why.
Mamdani has accused Israelis of genocide in Gaza, publicly backed the BDS movement, and aligned himself with left-wing activists — including Hasan Piker — whom many Jewish voters view as antisemitic. Mamdani’s wife has also come under fire for liking posts on social media celebrating the October 7 attacks in Israel.
Still, the broader portrait from the Marist poll is complicated.
Despite having an approval rating below 50%, the poll found 55% of registered voters hold a favorable view of the mayor, and 60% believe he’s fulfilling his campaign promises. Fifty-six percent say the city is moving in the right direction, and 52% think he’s changing New York for the better. Nearly 75% say he works hard. These are not the numbers of a mayor in collapse. They are, however, the numbers of a mayor who hasn’t yet closed the sale.
When asked about the poll at a Brooklyn press conference, Mamdani deflected with characteristic self-assurance.
“You know, I will always leave the grades to New Yorkers themselves,” he said.
“What I will say is that we are coming to the end of a hundred days in office, and we have sought to make this period one where we provide New Yorkers with a glimpse as to what these next four years will look like.”
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.
