(The Daily Signal)—This year’s midterm elections could decide the balance of power in Washington, as well as the ideological direction of the Democratic and Republican parties
Swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will again be political battlegrounds. But other states could prove just as decisive. Here are three you need to be watching.
Texas
On March 3, Republican and Democrat primary voters in the Lone Star State will go to the polls to determine their nominee for the state’s Senate race, which could play a significant role in determining the future of both parties.
On the Republican side, Sen. John Cornyn, an incumbent of over two decades, faces primary challenges from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt.
Both candidates have presented themselves as politically to the right of Cornyn.
Neither Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, nor President Donald Trump have made an endorsement in the primary.
Democrat primary voters will also decide between state Rep. James Talarico and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, both young candidates with a major social media presence.
In the Texas primary system, if no candidate receives over 50% of the vote in a primary election, that would trigger a May 26 runoff election between the top two primary candidates.
In the House of Representatives, several major Texas members are not seeking reelection, such as former foreign affairs chairman Michael McCaul, budget chairman Jodey Arrington, and freedom caucus member Chip Roy.
These departures, combined with a recent redistricting bill that could flip around a half dozen seats to Republicans, will amount to a transformation of the Texas delegation.
Maine
New England is a reliable liberal stronghold, but it features plenty of races this year that are important for determining both parties’ power in Congress.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is the only Republican member of Congress from the region, and she is up for reelection in 2026.
Having represented the state for three decades in the Senate, Collins has established herself as an independent Republican, voting against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and opposing a Republican-backed budget reconciliation bill in July. She holds significant influences in the Senate as the top Republican appropriator.
President Donald Trump recently said Collins “should never be elected to office again” after her vote to rein in his military powers in Venezuela.
Currently, the Cook Political Report rates the Maine Senate race a “toss-up” for 2026. Democrat competition has already lined up to challenge Collins for her seat.
Gov. Janet Mills and Graham Platner, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed candidate who appeals to the left-wing of the Democratic Party, are the Democrat frontrunners.
This Democratic primary itself encapsulates major tensions within the party, as Mills, a 78-year-old established party figure, faces off against Platner, a 41-year-old who has accused Israel of “genocide” and advocates highly interventionist economic policies.
Platner, however, announced this week he will step away from campaign activities to accompany his wife to Norway to seek IVF treatment. He said his campaign team will remain active in the state, according to WMTW.
Maine also presents opportunities for Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Democrat Rep. Jared Golden is not seeking reelection in 2026, presenting Republicans an opportunity in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, which Golden won by fewer than 3,000 votes in 2024.
Stepping up to the plate for Republicans is Paul LePage, who served as governor of Maine from 2011 until 2019.
New Hampshire
Another New England state to watch is New Hampshire, where Republicans control every branch of power on the state level but Democrats hold all federal offices.
Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is not seeking reelection in 2026, and Rep. Chris Pappas, D-N.H., is running for her seat.
Republican John Sununu, who held the Senate seat from 2003 to 2009, has launched a bid to retake his old seat.
Sununu has received the endorsements of dozens of sitting Republican senators, including Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming.
Scott Brown, a former Republican Senator for Massachusetts who now lives in New Hampshire, has entered the Granite State primary as well.
Cook Political Report rates New Hampshire as a “lean Democrat” seat.
What’s more, as the 2028 presidential election cycle approaches, candidates will likely be eager to woo New Hampshire voters, as the state will likely hold early primaries for Republicans and Democrats.
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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.
