(The Epoch Times)—In his final North Carolina rally of the 2024 campaign, former President Donald Trump predicted he would win the state where he prevailed in 2016 and 2020.
“North Carolina’s reliable for me,” Trump said at Dorton Arena in Raleigh, the first of four stops on Election Day Eve. “Never lost. And I don’t think we’re going to start now.”
The Trump campaign emphasized early voting across the country. In North Carolina, in-person early voting started in all 100 counties on Oct. 17 and ended on Nov. 2 at 3 p.m.
The State Board of Elections reported that more than 4.2 million residents cast early voting ballots—a record number.
The previous high for early voting happened in 2020, when more than 3.6 million ballots were cast.
Including absentee voting, 4,465,548 voters—or 57 percent of the state’s 7.8 million registered voters—cast ballots in the general election as of Nov. 3, according to the state board.
Official turnout could be even higher because of a lag between when ballots are turned in and when data is uploaded.
Lorena Castillo-Ritz, chair of the Mecklenburg County GOP in a region anchored by left-leaning Charlotte, said that the Trump campaign, conservative PACs, and her organization embarked on a “strong ground game” that targeted “low-propensity voters” who are registered to vote but did not cast their ballot in 2020.
“When we get people to vote who didn’t vote in the last election, that adds up and makes a significant impact in the overall numbers statewide,” Castillo-Ritz told The Epoch Times.
“We’re hopeful that getting the low-propensity voters to the polls in our area, and other urban areas across North Carolina, elevates President Trump to a win here.”
First in Line
Tony Caraccio is a 21-year-old HVAC professional in Asheboro. He was first in line at the Election Day eve rally in Raleigh, arriving at midnight for Trump’s scheduled 10 a.m. address. He believes that early voting numbers will benefit Trump when the ballots are counted.
“There was a widespread grassroots movement for early voting that we haven’t seen in the last few cycles. The campaign learned from its mistakes and focused on getting absentee ballots and early voting so that the election is too big to rig,” he said.
“I was too young to vote in 2020 and thought I’d never have a chance to vote for Trump. I wish the circumstances didn’t lead to him not winning then and running now, but at least I had the chance to vote for him this time.”
Turnout in the 25 western North Carolina counties impacted by Hurricane Helene was 58.9 percent—around 2 percent higher than the statewide total, the state board said.
Over the weekend, at a rally in Kinston, Trump praised the people who voted early in areas where homes and businesses were swept away by mudslides and flooding from Helene.
“Many of these people don’t even have a house anymore. The devastation is like something never seen. It’s largely areas where people like Trump that were affected, and even with all of that devastation, they turned out in record numbers early,” Trump said.
“The people of your state, the people of North Carolina, are amazing. I thought we would get 50 percent of the number that voted in 2020. [Instead] they broke the record,” he added.
Holding 16 Electoral College votes, North Carolina is a battleground state that both candidates covet.
Barack Obama became the first Democrat presidential candidate to win North Carolina in 30 years when he defeated John McCain in 2008. Trump prevailed in 2016 and then edged Biden by 1.3 percent of the vote in 2020.
Roy Cooper, who has served as governor since 2017, is a Democrat. He spoke in Raleigh before Harris took the stage as did attorney general Josh Stein, who is running for governor against Republican nominee Mark Robinson.
On Election Day eve, Trump held a 1.3 percent lead over Harris in the Real Clear Politics average of polls.
The western portion of the state was severely impacted by flooding and mudslides from Hurricane Helene, displacing many residents. The mountains of western North Carolina are considered a Republican stronghold.
The 25 counties that compose the disaster area have 1.3 million registered voters. In 2020, Trump won 604,119 votes to Joe Biden’s 356,902 votes in those counties, according to political analyst Ray Bonifay, who highlighted the importance of the region in an Oct. 18 commentary on RealClearPolitics.
Amid the surge of Republican early voters, the Harris campaign canceled $2 million in ad reservations in North Carolina media markets on Oct. 29, according to AdImpact. The previous day, the campaign reserved $2.7 million for an ad blitz.
The Carolina Journal reported that Harris was not abandoning the state but that she was shifting her focus to the Raleigh-Durham market.
In Charlotte on Nov. 2, Harris courted conservatives who are reluctant to support the former president.
“We know we have an opportunity in this election to turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who has been trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other,” Harris said.
Harris said that she will “represent all Americans, including those who don’t vote for me” and that “the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.”
Trump, she said, is focused on revenge and personal interests while she will put country over party.
“Donald Trump will walk in with an enemies list” if he is elected, Harris added.
“When I am elected, I will walk in with a to-do list, full of priorities I will get done for you the American people,” she said.
Voting Habits
Nathaniel Scripa moved to North Carolina from Syracuse, New York to live in a state that was more conservative, he told The Epoch Times.
“Now a lot of people from New York and other blue states are moving here and bringing with them their voting habits, which doesn’t make sense because the liberal policies that made their states so terrible are what led many of them here,” he said.
“That makes early voting, and getting people who usually don’t vote to get to the polls, important in this election,” he added.
Harris held rallies centered around the “When We Vote, We Win” motto. Trump believes that, in North Carolina and nationwide, the increase in Republican early voting combined with a traditional strong showing at the polls on Election Day will result in his victory.
“It’s ours to lose,” Trump said in Raleigh. “If we get everybody out and vote, there’s not a thing they can do.”
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.
