As New Jersey heads into the November 4, 2025, gubernatorial election, voters face a stark choice between two very different visions for the Garden State. On one side, there’s Jack Ciattarelli, a proven businessman and former assemblyman who’s ready to tackle the everyday problems hitting families hard – skyrocketing taxes, failing schools, and rising crime. On the other, Mikie Sherrill, a Washington congresswoman whose record aligns closely with the national Democratic agenda that has left many New Jerseyans struggling. With recent polls showing the race in a dead heat, it’s time to cut through the noise and see why Ciattarelli is the one who can deliver real results.
Let’s start with the economy, because that’s what keeps most of us up at night. New Jersey has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and under Democratic leadership, they’ve only gone up. Ciattarelli has a straightforward plan to cap property taxes as a percentage of your home’s assessed value, expand the senior freeze program, and slash income taxes across the board while consolidating brackets to make things simpler. He’ll also make student loan interest deductible and cut the corporate business tax by 1% each year for five years to attract jobs and keep businesses here.
This isn’t pie-in-the-sky stuff; it’s about trimming wasteful state spending by 30% and limiting future budgets to inflation rates. Imagine keeping more of your paycheck instead of sending it to Trenton.
Sherrill, meanwhile, talks a good game on affordability but her approach boils down to more government programs and tax credits that don’t address the root causes. She’s focused on auditing health benefits and tweaking credits for caregivers and families, but that ignores the bigger picture of out-of-control spending that’s driven up costs for everyone. Her time in Congress has seen her vote in lockstep with Biden’s policies over 90% of the time, including massive federal spending bills that fueled inflation. New Jersey can’t afford another leader who’s more interested in Washington-style handouts than real tax relief.
Public safety is another area where Ciattarelli shines. Crime has spiked in cities like Newark and Camden, and families deserve better. Ciattarelli will repeal the Immigrant Trust Directive that turned New Jersey into a sanctuary state, banning sanctuary cities and ensuring local law enforcement can work with federal authorities to deport criminals.
He’ll fix bail reform loopholes by appointing tough judges and prosecutors, and restore protections for police officers who put their lives on the line every day. This means incentivizing community policing and bringing back cost-of-living adjustments for police and fire pensions without cutting benefits.
Sherrill’s stance? She’s defended policies that limit local cooperation with ICE, which Ciattarelli rightly says encourages illegal immigration and ties the hands of cops. In a state as diverse as ours, we need trust between communities and law enforcement, but not at the expense of letting dangerous criminals roam free. Her record shows a softer approach that prioritizes national Democratic talking points over the safety of New Jersey streets.
Education is a battleground, and Ciattarelli is on the side of parents and students. He’ll reform the school funding formula to set a per-pupil standard, let funding follow the child, and expand charter schools and school choice programs like those that have worked wonders in Florida. He wants to reduce the grip of union bosses, offer teachers better pension options, and mandate a Parents’ Bill of Rights for full transparency on curriculums. No more explicit content snuck into classrooms without parents knowing – it’s about age-appropriate learning and preparing kids for real jobs through vo-tech partnerships.
Sherrill, by contrast, hasn’t laid out bold reforms to empower parents or fix underperforming districts. Her focus seems more on expanding government programs like pre-K without the flexibility families need. With New Jersey schools still recovering from pandemic disruptions, we can’t risk a governor who won’t stand up to special interests and put kids first.
Energy costs are hammering households, and Ciattarelli has a no-nonsense plan to draft a new Energy Master Plan with an “all-of-the-above” strategy – nuclear, solar, natural gas – while banning offshore wind farms that jack up rates without delivering reliable power. He’ll pull out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is basically a hidden tax on your electric bill.
Sherrill has criticized efforts to cut renewable funding and pointed fingers at utility profits, but she’s tied to the green mandates that have driven up costs under Murphy’s administration. In their recent debate, she defended these policies while Ciattarelli called for practical solutions that won’t bankrupt families.
On social issues, the differences couldn’t be clearer. Ciattarelli supports prohibiting elective abortions after 20 weeks, with exceptions for the mother’s life, and opposes taxpayer funding for them. He wants parental notification for minors and more education to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Sherrill pushes to enshrine unlimited abortion rights in the state constitution, expand insurance coverage, and even stockpile abortion pills – positions that go far beyond what many New Jerseyans are comfortable with.
Housing is yet another divide. Ciattarelli wants to scrap the outdated affordable housing mandates that force every town to build, focusing instead on urban centers and transit hubs with impact fees on developments like warehouses. Sherrill aims to boost loans and tax credits for housing but risks more top-down mandates that ignore local needs.
This election isn’t just about policies; it’s about who understands New Jersey. Ciattarelli is a lifelong resident, entrepreneur, and CPA who’s built businesses and balanced budgets. He’s earned endorsements from key Republicans, including Donald Trump, because he delivers on promises. Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and prosecutor, has spent years in D.C., where she’s racked up a progressive voting record that doesn’t match our state’s needs. Polls from Emerson College and Quinnipiac show this race is neck-and-neck, with Ciattarelli closing the gap as voters learn more.
New Jersey deserves a governor who will fight for lower taxes, safer streets, better schools, and energy we can afford. Jack Ciattarelli is that leader. On November 4, vote for the change we need – vote Ciattarelli.
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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.
