(The Epoch Times)—Voters in Florida, Alaska, and Wyoming head to the polls on Aug. 18 to cast their ballots in key primary races that could determine control of Congress. In California, a special election is being held to replace Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned his seat in April.
Multiple states also have gubernatorial races in which President Donald Trump has offered his endorsements.
Here are the races to watch.
Florida
In the Sunshine State, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) is the prohibitive favorite to get the GOP nomination for governor.
Donalds, who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, faces nine other candidates in the primary, including investor James Fishback, Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, and former Florida House of Representatives Speaker Paul Renner.
Donalds has campaigned on making Florida more affordable, fighting illegal immigration, improving infrastructure, preserving the environment, and stopping government waste.
A central part of Fishback’s platform is banning data centers in Florida.
“Data centers raise electric bills, jeopardize our water supply, and crater property values in surrounding communities,” his campaign website states. “They consume enormous amounts of land, water, and power, and Floridians get nothing in return.”
The Democratic primary includes former Rep. David Jolly, state Rep. Dotie Joseph, and four other candidates.
Jolly, a former Republican, has run on tackling property insurance costs, investing in public schools, reforming campaign finance and ethics rules, and reducing gun violence.
The winner in November will succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is term-limited.
In addition to the gubernatorial contest, there are races for the House. This comes after Florida redrew its congressional map to give Republicans an advantage following other states doing the same.
The GOP primary in the 19th Congressional District to succeed Donalds is competitive as it includes two former out-of-state members of Congress: Madison Cawthorn and Chris Collins. Cawthorn represented North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District between 2021 and 2023, while Collins held New York’s 27th Congressional District seat between 2013 and 2019.
However, the apparent frontrunner is Catalina Lauf, who worked in Trump’s first administration and has drawn his endorsement. Her campaign issues include cutting wasteful spending, cracking down on illegal immigration, and championing the Make America Healthy Again movement.
The Cook Political Report rates the district as “Solid Republican.”
Over in the 20th, a district that the Cook Political Report rates as “Solid Democratic,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) is looking to stay in Congress by running in that district instead of her current 25th Congressional District, which was redrawn to make it a toss-up.
Wasserman Schultz faces four other candidates, including former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who represented this district between January 2022 and April 2026. Cherfilus-McCormick resigned as she faced a House Ethics Committee probe over her allegedly stealing $5 million in disaster relief money to fund her congressional campaign. The Department of Justice indicted Cherfilus-McCormick in November 2025.
The 25th Congressional District went from a reliably Democratic district to a competitive one. The Democratic primary between Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), who now represents the 23rd Congressional District, and Democratic Socialists of America member Oliver Larkin is a test of the Democratic Party on how it views Israel. Moskowitz is pro-Israel, while Larkin is critical of the Jewish state. The frontrunner on the GOP side is former Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer.
Alaska
Two men named “Dan Sullivan” are running for Senate in the Last Frontier. Both are Republicans: incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan and former U.S. Forest Service employee Dan J. Sullivan.
The notable Democrat running for the seat is former Rep. Mary Peltola (D-Alaska), who occupied Alaska’s at-large U.S. House seat between 2023 and 2025. Peltola was recruited by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to flip the seat and help Democrats take back the Senate. This race, which the Cook Political Report rates as a toss-up, could determine which party controls the upper congressional chamber.
Twelve Republicans are running for governor, including former state Attorney General Treg Taylor, former state Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum, former state Sens. Click Bishop, Shelley Hughes and Lesil McGuire, Matanuska-Susitna Borough Mayor Edna DeVries, business owner and conservative activist Bernadette Wilson, and former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson. Whoever wins the primary is likely to win in November as the Cook Political Report rates the race as “likely Republican.”
The two Democrats running for governor are former Alaska Senate Minority Leader Tom Begich and former state Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. Begich is the uncle of Rep. Nick Begich (R-Alaska).
The winner will succeed Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who is term-limited.
Wyoming
In Wyoming, the races to watch are for governor and U.S. Senate.
The gubernatorial race to succeed Gov. Mark Gordon, who is term-limited, includes these Republicans: Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, state Sen. Eric Barlow, retired U.S. Marine Corps Col. Brent Bien, and rodeo-production professional Curt Blake. Trump has endorsed Degenfelder, while the state GOP has endorsed Bien.
The Cook Political Report rates the race as “Solid Republican.”
Meanwhile, the Senate race, which the Cook Political Report rates as “Solid Republican,” is all but guaranteed on the Republican side to be won by Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), who has Trump’s backing. She faces four other Republicans. The Democrats running are former state Rep. James Byrd and Billy Benavidez.
The winner in November will succeed Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who declined to run for reelection.
California
There is a special election in the Golden State’s 14th Congressional District to serve the remainder of the term of former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.
State Sen. Aisha Wahab and Bay Area Rapid Transit Board President Melissa Hernandez, both Democrats, were the top two vote-getters in the June 16 special primary and advanced to a runoff.
Wahab placed first in both the special primary and the June 2 primary. She and Hernandez will also face off against each other in the fall.
The special election runoff winner will finish Swalwell’s term. Wahab and Hernandez will face off against each other again in the fall to fill the seat in the new term. Swalwell resigned in April following allegations of sexual assault by numerous women, including former staffers.
Whoever wins the special election will narrow the Republican majority in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will be able to lose only two Republicans on party-line votes.
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.
