(DCNF)—A carless island known for its fudge, horse-drawn carriages and pre-modern charm seems an unlikely spot for a political war to breakout during a campaign for a United States Senate seat in the year 2026.
But that is what happened when footage from a 2020 documentary went viral Friday of presumptive Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed seemingly ripping Michigan’s Mackinac Island. To those not from the Great Lakes State, that may seem like a silly issue to lose ones marbles over.
To a Michigander, that is the equivalent of a Massachusetts Senate candidate calling Fenway Park trash, or an Egyptian candidate calling the Great Pyramids an abomination. Generations of Michiganders went on family and school trips to the island that is situated near the state’s upper and lower peninsulas in the Straits of Mackinac.
“I hate Mackinac so much. Every time I’ve ever come here, I’ve hated it. Why am I here?” El-Sayed said while attending the influential annual Mackinac Policy Conference. The comments were recorded in a 2020 documentary, “How to Fix a Primary,” that chronicled El-Sayed’s failed 2018 Michigan gubernatorial campaign.
Lest you think Mackinac Island has become only a conservative-driven issue, don’t forget that during the first Trump administration then-Vice President Mike Pence was denounced by a bipartisan swath of Michiganders for riding in a motorcade on the island where cars are outlawed.
Supporters of El-Sayed claimed the clip was taken out of context, and that the Democratic candidate was referring to the Mackinac Policy Conference, not the island itself.
Predictably opponents such as former Michigan Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who will be El-Sayed’s rival for the Senate seat in November, seized on the clip knowing it struck a chord with Michiganders.
Rogers posted pictures of himself on Mackinac Island Friday in which he professed his love for the Michigan tourist staple.
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“There’s no place like Mackinac,” Rogers said in the post.
Michigan native Kid Rock joined “Fox and Friends Weekend” Saturday to rip El-Sayed over his anti-Mackinac comments, calling the island “one of the most beautiful places in America.”
El-Sayed responded by adroitly framing the clip as representing a broader economic issue. “Both of these multimillionaires can afford a weekend on Mackinac Island. How about you and your family?” El-Sayed posted on X.
So, does El-Sayed have a point? Yes and no.
He’s right that staying on the island for a weekend would break your bank; a stay at the world-famous Grand Hotel (which was featured in the Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour film “Somewhere In Time”) would set you back over $1,200 for one night during the summer tourist season compared to hotels starting at roughly $228 in nearby St. Ignace, Michigan. And that doesn’t include the cost of the ferry ticket to get to the island, food, gas, carriage tours and other travel-related costs.
El-Sayed’s retort holds water in an election in which affordability is top of voters’ mind.
However, El-Sayed is also over-simplifying his point. As a Michigander, he surely knows that Mackinac Island has always been expensive, but generations of Michiganders have saved to make the trip and most don’t actually stay on the island, they go for the day or they get a cheaper hotel located on the mainland Upper Peninsula or Lower Peninsula.
By attacking Mackinac Island, El-Sayed also is going further than just making this an economic issue, he is attacking a right of passage for those who grew up in the Great Lakes State. The island that has outlawed cars and features a tour of a large 18th-century fort is as American as apple pie.
El-Sayed’s Mackinac attack might appeal to those who despise American colonialism: the British and French raised flags over Fort Michilimackinac before the stars and stripes flew over the island.
This strategy might play with his base in college towns like Ann Arbor, but betting the house on attacking an island beloved by the wider populace is a risky strategy.
The island sits near the five-mile long Mackinac Bridge, the largest suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere that connects the state’s two peninsulas, and which Michiganders refer to as simply “the bridge.” (Yoopers, as the residents of the Upper Peninsula are known, call residents who live in the Lower Peninsula “trolls,” because they live under the bridge.)
El-Sayed needs working-class, lower-educated voters in the counties of Northern Michigan on both sides of the bridge to turn out for him in November after Democratic Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens won those counties during Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
Rogers narrowly led El-Sayed in the RealClearPolling average last updated before Tuesday’s primary.
There is something about the island that strikes at the core of being a proud Michigander that goes beyond merely class and economic concerns.
No matter who wins, the “gales of November” will come early in the 2026 midterm elections.
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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.
