(NOQ Report)—Voters in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District turned out on a chilly December day to choose a successor to Rep. Mark Green, who stepped down in July after a decade in office. Republican Matt Van Epps, a West Point graduate and Army National Guard colonel, emerged victorious over Democrat Aftyn Behn, a Nashville state representative. With about 85% of votes counted, Van Epps led with 52% to Behn’s 47%, a narrower margin than the district’s usual Republican blowouts but enough to keep the seat in GOP hands.
The district, which stretches from the suburbs west of Nashville through rural counties, has long been a Republican stronghold. President Trump won it by 22 points in 2024, and Green routinely pulled double-digit victories. Yet this special election felt different from the start. Democrats poured resources into the race, sensing an opening amid national headwinds for the GOP.
Behn’s campaign hammered affordability, echoing Democratic successes in off-year races in New Jersey and Virginia last month. But Van Epps countered with promises to cut costs and secure the border, framing himself as the steady hand to carry forward Green’s work.
Early voting gave Behn a clear edge, a pattern that’s frustrated Republicans in recent cycles. She banked support from urban Nashville voters worried about grocery prices and housing. Van Epps, though, surged on Election Day, dominating in the district’s conservative rural precincts. That split suggests GOP get-out-the-vote operations—bolstered by Trump’s tele-rallies and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s last-minute swing through Franklin—paid off just enough.
“A special election is an odd thing, anything can happen, so we take no vote for granted,” Johnson said at a rally the day before polls opened, noting how turnout often dips without the usual November fanfare.
The race wasn’t cheap. Super PACs aligned with Trump dumped over $1.7 million into ads boosting Van Epps, while Democrats matched them nearly dollar for dollar through their House majority PAC and Behn’s own committee. Total spending topped $6 million, turning airwaves into a battlefield.
Republicans zeroed in on Behn’s past statements, airing clips where she called herself “a very radical person” and voiced support for defunding the police. One Van Epps spot branded her a “radical disaster,” warning that her agenda meant higher taxes for working families. Democrats fired back, tying Van Epps to what they called Trump’s “toxic” policies, like efforts to roll back health coverage for thousands of Tennesseans.
Van Epps, who served as Tennessee’s commissioner of general services under Gov. Bill Lee, leaned hard into his military credentials and Trump’s backing. In an October interview, he laid out his pitch plainly: campaigning on “security, opportunity and prosperity” and vowing to “pick up the ball and run with it” on border security, a nod to Green’s time leading the House Homeland Security Committee.
Endorsements rolled in from Trump, Green, and state heavyweights like Rep. Diana Harshbarger, whose district neighbors the 7th. Harshbarger, a vocal Trump ally, joined the chorus urging conservatives to show up, especially after Trump’s recent pardon of her husband in a long-ago health care fraud case—a move that drew whispers of favoritism but solidified GOP loyalty in Tennessee.
For Behn, the loss stings in a district where Democrats have made inroads before. She’s built a profile as a progressive organizer, drawing comparisons to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and pulling in old Democrats like Kamala Harris and Al Gore to her events. Yet her old podcast remarks—saying she “hates this city” about Nashville, the very place she now represents—gave opponents endless ammo.
Republicans painted her opposition to releasing Jeffrey Epstein files as suspicious, especially after Trump signed the transparency bill into law on November 21. Was Behn shielding powerful interests, or just toeing a party line? The ads let voters decide, and they leaned toward doubt.
This result offers a mixed signal for Republicans heading into 2026. Holding a safe seat by single digits shows the party’s base remains fired up, but it also exposes cracks. Trump’s direct involvement—phoning into rallies and breaking a social media silence to rally the faithful—kept the race from slipping away. Still, with the House majority hanging by a thread, Speaker Johnson can’t afford many more nail-biters like this.
Van Epps, sworn in soon, has his eye on the Armed Services Committee, where his combat experience as a helicopter pilot could prove useful amid ongoing border and global tensions.
Tennessee’s 7th District delivered what it usually does: a win for the home team. But the close call serves as a reminder that even deep-red ground needs tending, especially when outside money and national narratives turn a quiet special into something bigger. Van Epps takes the oath knowing the work ahead—lowering costs, securing borders, and keeping faith with voters who braved the rain to cast their lot with him.
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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.
