(DCNF)—California’s new redistricting author, Paul Mitchell, told lawyers during his deposition that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) sent its payment to his accountant, who also appears to be the chief financial officer of a political consulting firm that aided efforts opposing Proposition 50.
Democrats’ Prop 50 drama began in July after Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom formally proposed a constitutional amendment to allow legislative redistricting in response to Texas’ redistricting. After the DCCC unveiled the maps to the Legislature in August, Mitchell’s role in the chaos was confirmed. But questions surrounding his title and the details of his involvement intensified after the Department of Justice (DOJ) joined state Republicans in suing the DCCC and others connected to the maps.
During the DOJ and state GOP’s case before a three-judge panel in downtown Los Angeles beginning Dec. 15, Mitchell notably declined to testify before the judges and attorneys regarding his experience crafting the maps. However, while he turned down in-court testimony, Mitchell did sit for an hours-long deposition, answering questions about the timeline and certain details surrounding the requests tied to the maps.
Mitchell told lawyers during questioning that he was paid a total of $325,000 for his services redrawing the maps, with an estimated $108,000 coming from the DCCC. Public DCCC payment records from this year show Mitchell’s firm, Redistricting Partners, was paid $108,333.33 on Aug. 20, with additional payments collected later.
Notably, the invoice from the DCCC listed the same address as a Sacramento-based campaign and public affairs consultancy known as Swing Strategies. When asked about the apparent discrepancy, Mitchell told lawyers the invoice was issued to his company, but his accountant is Swing Strategies’ chief financial officer, Ken Andres.
Swing Strategies, a top political consulting firm, describes itself as having an 88% win rate on California statewide ballot propositions by running “successful campaigns” that allow the firm to “lead and collaborate to deliver victories” for its clients. The firm’s past work is bipartisan, having aided figures such as former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and former Democratic California Assembly Majority Leader Ian Calderon.
According to Andres’ biography on the firm’s website, he previously co-owned a bookkeeping services company with his wife for more than five years, serving clients across industries including construction, medicine and nonprofit organizations. In his current role at Swing Strategies, Andres oversees all financial management aspects of the company’s operations.
Mitchell explained in his deposition that Andres has served as his accountant since 2011, adding that the two became personal friends after being introduced by Republican consultant Matt Rexroad, who formed Meridian Pacific Inc., a Republican political campaign consulting firm.
“He’s a good friend,” Mitchell described Andres.
Andres did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
But while Swing Strategies has worked on a mix of ballot propositions in the deep-blue state, the company also appeared on public payment records tied to the “No on Prop. 50” campaign. According to state records, one of the leading PACs, Protect Voters First, paid more than $30 million to Meridian Pacific Inc., doing business as Swing Strategies.
The first payments to the firm began Aug. 19, with five transactions made that day. One payment totaled $3,661,523.07, a second $5,600,124.12, a third $90,000, a fourth $55,000 and a final payment for that day of $5,000.
When asked about Andres serving as the bookkeeper for both Swing Strategies and Redistricting Partners, Mitchell confirmed the arrangement, adding that Swing Strategies “was the no campaign.”
“Small world,” Mitchell said.
Speculations over the efforts from the state’s GOP and the “No” campaign was brought into question following the passing of Prop 50. At the height of the fight McCarthy reportedly pledged to fellow party members he would help raise up to $100 million to help defeat the “Yes” campaign. However, his PAC, No on 50: Stop the Sacramento Power Grab, only raised $11.6 million, with $1 million coming from the former House Speaker’s defunct congressional campaign account, according to Cal Matters.
McCarthy reportedly led the second PAC with the help of former California GOP Chairwoman Jessica Patterson, who was allegedly paid half a million by the “No on 50” committee, according to the California Globe.
A report from the SoCal Daily Pulse, which has since been taken down, initially alleged Patterson “personally steered” media contracts to have the “No” PACs work with Swing Strategies. The arrangement to work with the company allegedly had her negotiate a 1% cut of the total ad buy spend for herself, which would have her potentially profiting roughly $310,000 from the estimated $31 million. The total from the alleged cut and payment from the committee potentially puts Patterson at almost $1 million in compensation for efforts that failed Republicans in the state.
The efforts made by Swing Strategies were also called into question as donors allegedly expressed their concerns regarding the quality of the mailers used for the “No” campaign. Voters reportedly also received “No” campaign mailers after Election Day, with some allegedly receiving as many as three in one day, the California Globe reported.
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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.
