(The Center Square)–U.S. Sen. Dan S. Sullivan and Mary Peltola advanced to November’s general election for U.S. Senate in Alaska’s crucial race to determine control of the upper chamber.
Alaska voters selected the incumbent Republican senator and a prominent former congresswoman as two of the top four vote getters in the state’s nonpartisan primary on Tuesday. The other two candidates were unclear by the time of publication.
Sullivan has touted his record supporting the Trump administration’s agenda, including his vote for the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and the Save America Act, signature Trump policies that are unpopular with other Alaska Republicans including Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
“I don’t think we have a big voter challenge in terms of cheating in Alaska, but for the country, there’s a place in the country where this is an important issue,” Sullivan said. “This is not focused on disenfranchising Alaska voters.”
In recent days, Sullivan ramped up his attacks on Peltola, who represented Alaska in the state’s sole U.S. House seat until she lost reelection in 2024.
Sullivan associated Peltola with Democrats in other states and accused her of attempting to play “political games.”
“Alaska is the firewall for freedom in America, and this election is too important for Alaskans to allow the political games being played by Mary Peltola and Lower 48 liberals to work,” Dan S. Sullivan said.
Peltola has focused her campaign on promoting local issues in Alaska including access to lands for fishing and bringing more oil refineries to the state. She also called for expanding solar and wind energy tax credits and eliminating the federal income tax for Alaska households earning less thatn $92,000 per year.
“Alaskans know life is harder here — but there’s only so many times you can sacrifice groceries or skip a doctor’s visit before you start to loathe the DC politicians who keep making things worse,” Peltola said. “It shouldn’t be this hard to get by in Alaska, and when I’m in the U.S. Senate, I’m going to fight to make life affordable for hardworking Alaska families.”
Peltola earned more votes than incumbent Sullivan with 61,189 as of early Wednesday morning, according to the Alaska Secretary of State. In comparison, Dan S. Sullivan earned 55,461 votes.
“Tonight shows Alaskans are fired up and ready for an independent voice in the Senate who will fix the rigged system, lower costs, and put Alaska first,” Peltola wrote on social media.
Another notable candidate in the race was Dan J. Sullivan Jr., a Republican who earned the third highest amount of votes at the time of publication with 3,147. His candidacy has been criticized and brought with legal challenges over having the same name as the incumbent Senator.
Trump slammed Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy and accused him of being aligned with Democrats in Alaska, including Peltola, to confuse voters. Dan J. Sullivan Jr. has denied any connection to Peltola or other Democrats.
“The Crooked, Radical Left Dumocrats have put up another man named ‘Dan Sullivan,’ and they did this to take away votes from our Great Senator of the same name,” Trump wrote on social media. “Democrats are trying to ‘trick’ Alaskans, and treat Alaskan Voters with contempt.”
Dan J. Sullivan Jr. has focused his campaign on criticizing the Trump administration’s cuts to federal forestry and wildlife programs in Alaska.
“We lost a lot of people. We lost a lot of programs. We lost a lot of money,” Sullivan said. “We lost a lot of scientific data that’s important to our fisheries programs.”
Dan S. Sullivan leads in fundraising with more than $7.2 million in cash on hand, followed by Peltola with more than $4.6 million, according to the Federal Election Commission.
It was still too early to tell by the time of publication who the third and fourth highest vote-getters would be in the critical election with consequences for the balance of the U.S. Senate. Republicans currently control the chamber with a 53-45 makeup, while two independent members caucus with Democrats.
Democrats see Alaska as a prime opportunity to flip seats in the chamber. The Cook Political Report ranks Alaska’s U.S. Senate race as one of four “toss up” elections.
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.
