(The Epoch Times)—A candidate aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America has been defeated in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, marking a major upset in a race the candidate had been expected to win.
At 3:34 a.m. ET on Aug. 12, the Associated Press called the race for Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who beat state Rep. Francesca Hong by the thinnest of margins, 39.8 percent to Hong’s 39.4 percent.
Hong’s defeat by a hair comes as a major political upset given that she had dominated polling for weeks over the late-entering Crowley, who only announced his run on July 18.
Crowley’s unexpectedly strong performance, coming alongside a firm endorsement and campaign support by Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers in the final lap of the race, underscores that the ongoing battle between moderates and the far left flank of the party is far from settled, even as democratic socialist candidates have enjoyed a series of wins in other Democratic races.
Given that Hong lost by less than one percent, she is entitled to request a recount.
Democrats ultimately rejected Hong amid concerns from within the party that past remarks—including a post calling to “Cancel Thanksgiving”—could raise significant challenges in the general election.
General Election Match-Up
Crowley is now set to take on Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), who easily won the Republican nomination, in November.
National attention has remained centered on the politically critical swing state, which voted for both President Donald Trump and Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin in 2024.
Tiffany, who had been gearing up for a fight with Hong, had described the race as a referendum on democratic socialism, saying that he believed the race poses the question, “Is the American heartland going to be the firewall that stops this movement of socialism coming from—especially—the East Coast?”
With Hong’s defeat from within the Democratic Party, Tiffany’s campaign will now have to rapidly switch gears to run a race against a candidate who’s seen by many as stronger than Hong in a general election match-up.
In his endorsement of Crowley, Evers wrote, “He’s not just a candidate who can win in November, but he’s the kind of person who cares about doing the job right, he has the experience to make tough decisions, and he’s the only person in this race who’s proven he can work together with others to get good things done.”
Tiffany had previously discouraged Republicans from voting in the Democratic primary to boost Hong’s chances.
An Unexpected Nail-Biter
Crowley’s watch party in Milwaukee was sparsely attended and relatively small compared to other such events. A sense of resignation hung over the attendees, aware that they were at a party being held by a candidate that polls said was fated to lose—even as Crowley insisted that he could achieve an upset.
“It just feels like she came out of nowhere,” one attendee told another at the party, reflecting the despondency and bewilderment many felt toward Hong’s apparent dominance.
That energy began to shift as Crowley, a moderate, defied expectations in the all-important Dane County, home to Hong’s stronghold of Madison. While Hong led in the county, Crowley trailed closely behind.
Journalists could be heard whispering in shock, while attendees grew more excited, as it became clear that Crowley was holding his lead, with attention focusing on the returns in Dane County.
Later in the evening, Hong gave a speech vowing to continue fighting until the final results came in, while also adopting a retrospective tone in her remarks.
“We are here tonight because thousands and thousands of Wisconsinites across this great state came together in living rooms, in bars, in church basements, in community centers, and we came together to demand something new, and something better,” Hong told her supporters in a late night speech at her Madison headquarters.
By this point, attendees at the Milwaukee watch party had almost all filed into the event space, displaying a mix of satisfaction—and relief—as the tide turned in Crowley’s favor.
Chants of “David, David!” and “Crowley, Crowley” erupted several times.
Last-Minute Momentum
Crowley had been pitted as a last-minute alternative to Hong—one that even local Democrats doubted could win the nomination.
At the Milwaukee County Democratic Headquarters, Hong’s impending victory was seen as practically a given.
“Too little, too late,” Dale Nook, the team leader for the Bayview Wisconsin Democrats, told The Epoch Times just hours before Crowley’s upset victory, expressing the common sentiment toward Crowley’s late entry into the race.
“At first he wasn’t going to weigh in at all,” Nook said, expressing some bewilderment about Crowley’s decision to jump in the primary.
Even in Crowley’s home turf of Milwaukee, signs favoring Hong dominated the suburbs.
In the final days of the race, Crowley clinched several high-profile endorsements from figures who emphasized Crowley’s experience and electability.
Aside from Evers, these included Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson.
Hong, meanwhile, faced escalating issues related to past statements she had made on X, called Twitter at the time.
In one 2020 post, Hong wrote, “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women so be it.”
Recently, Hong has distanced herself from those posts, describing them as having been driven by her frustrations as a student and business owner during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week, she told Politico that Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday.
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.
