(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Are we witnessing a surge in the polls that will ultimately decide this election? At this time in 2016, Hillary Clinton had an enormous lead over Donald Trump, but over the last several weeks of the campaign the polls dramatically tightened. The more that the American people saw Donald Trump, the more they liked him. And the more that the American people saw Hillary Clinton, the less they liked her. It appears that a very similar thing is happening now. Donald Trump has always been a star, and his massive rallies are an incredibly powerful campaigning tool. No matter how much money Kamala Harris spends, she can’t recreate the same kind of emotional energy that Trump generates, because Kamala Harris is not a star. She simply does not have the ability to move people emotionally the way that Trump does, and it was an enormous mistake for the Democrats to choose her as the nominee.
A brand new NBC News national poll shows the momentum that Trump has been able to create in recent weeks.
September’s NBC News national poll had Harris up by five points, but now in the latest poll the two candidates are tied…
In the new poll — which was conducted Oct. 4-8 — Harris gets support from 48% of registered voters in a head-to-head matchup, while Trump gets an identical 48%. Another 4% say they are undecided or wouldn’t vote for either option when forced to choose between those two major-party candidates.
That’s a change from September’s NBC News poll, which found Harris leading Trump by 5 points, 49%-44%, though that result was within the margin of error.
And when third-party candidates are included, that same poll shows that Trump is actually leading…
An expanded ballot including third-party candidates also shows this shift, with 47% of registered voters in the new poll picking Trump, 46% supporting Harris and a combined 7% picking other candidates or saying they’re undecided.
In September, however, Harris held a 6-point lead on this expanded ballot.
The mainstream media kept telling us that this was a “static” race.
But these numbers tell an entirely different story.
During a segment discussing this new poll, Steve Kornacki explained that Donald Trump’s favorability rating is rising and meanwhile the opposite is true for Kamala Harris.
Of course this isn’t the only poll that shows that Trump is building up momentum.
Journalist Mark Halperin says that private polling on both sides shows that the numbers are definitely moving in Trump’s favor right now…
“When I’ve reported over the last several days about private polling” which is favorable to Trump, says @MarkHalperin, “that is not Republican-only private polling. It’s reflected in the Democratic private polling, too. In fact, I think if you’d ask the Harris campaign about their polling, you’d hear a similar story. This is not spin by Republicans about secret or fake polls. This is what is happening in the data. And as we’ve said repeatedly, the public and private data differs. The public data is cheap and has issues in almost every case. It’s just the nature of the beast now for academic and media organizations, not every one, but most.”
This certainly does not mean that Trump has the election wrapped up.
So much could still happen between now and November.
In fact, some very disturbing allegations about Tim Walz are being released as I write this article. So we shall see what happens.
But right now the big online betting markets seem to think that Trump is going to win…
Former President Donald Trump is currently leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 10 points on the Polymarket prediction platform — a sharp reversal over betting odds in September.
According to the latest Polymarket data, Trump currently has a 55% chance of securing the Oval Office in November compared to Harris’ 45% chance.
The former President also reversed Harris’ lead in 4 of 6 swing states and now leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — with Arizona and Georgia representing the GOP candidate’s widest margins of victory.
About a month ago, the Democrats were feeling very confident.
But now panic is clearly starting to set in…
Of course, that has not stopped both parties from doing what they always do. In Democrats’ case, this appears to be the week when their traditional preëlection panic has set in. Strategists are now warning that Harris has “plateaued,” that she “needs to be more aggressive,” and that she has to reinvent herself as a centrist to “seal the deal.” In recent days, I’ve read articles dissecting her challenges with male voters, Black male voters, Arab voters, Latino voters, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin voters. She also, apparently, has a Biden problem, a Bibi problem, and a hurricane problem.
Harris just isn’t very inspiring at all, and many people find her to be extremely annoying.
These flaws torpedoed her run for the presidency in 2020, and they are likely to be fatal this time around too.
If you want to run for president and win, you need to be a star.
It really is that simple.
The reason why Trump draws such large crowds to his rallies is because millions upon millions of Americans absolutely adore him.
That also makes Trump a target, and it appears that a “third assassination attempt” was just thwarted…
A third assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump was thwarted on Saturday after a Las Vegas man was arrested with weapons and fake passes about a half mile from Trump’s campaign rally in Coachella Valley, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said Sunday.
Deputies assigned to Trump’s rally said the driver, Vem Miller, rolled up in a black SUV to a checkpoint at the intersection of Avenue 52 and Celebration Drive around 5 p.m. He was found to be in illegal possession of a shotgun, loaded handgun, and a high-capacity magazine, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said in a news release.
Bianco told the Southern California News Group on Sunday that he believes Miller — who he said is a member of a right–leaning anti-government group — planned to kill Trump and that deputies thwarted the plan when Miller presented fake VIP and press passes at a checkpoint.
“They were different enough to cause the deputies alarm,” Bianco said. “We probably stopped another assassination attempt.”
As I have stated before, it really will be a miracle if Trump actually makes it to the election.
And no matter who ultimately emerges victorious, the truth is that we are a bitterly divided nation that is rapidly heading in the wrong direction.
Whether Trump wins or Harris wins, I am expecting tremendous civil unrest following the outcome of this election.
So those that are looking at election day as the finish line are getting it all wrong.
This election will not be the end of anything. Instead, it will simply be the beginning of an entirely new chapter.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
