(The Epoch Times)—Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) has said he will remain a Democrat and provide the majority-making vote if his party wins the Senate in November, hours after delivering a video address at the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas.
Fetterman’s office issued a statement in response to renewed questions about his party affiliation in the video’s aftermath.
“My remarks introduced Dave McCormick as a great American and friend,” Fetterman said in the statement provided to The Epoch Times on Sept. 10.
“We are in different parties, but we are both Team PA. We have delivered hundreds of millions of dollars back to Pennsylvania, fought for improved transportation and affordable housing, and the Steel Way of Life,” he continued.
“I’m a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party—and should the Senate flip in November, I will still be the 51st vote that I ran on.”
It’s at least the fifth time in two years that Fetterman has publicly ruled out leaving the party.
In the video, recorded in front of a U.S. Steel mill in the Monongahela Valley, Fetterman introduced Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) to the convention crowd at the American Airlines Center on Sept. 9.
“Yes, I’m a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I’m a commonsense Democrat,” Fetterman said. “I’m always gonna stand with America. I’m always gonna reject the extremes of socialism and that anti-American way of life.”
He praised McCormick and President Donald Trump over steel.
“Right back over my shoulder, that’s the iconic U.S. Steel mill, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that we will work together, and will work with President Trump, to fight and defend—the Steel Way of Life right here in the Steel Valley,” Fetterman said.
“I have this opportunity to introduce this great American, a great senator, and, yes, he is in a different party, but I’m proud to count him as my great friend.”
Many Democrats—including elected Democrats from his home state—criticized the appearance.
Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said on Thursday morning that the video had cost Fetterman her support.
“I know, and I like John Fetterman, but he lost me last night with that stunt,” Dean said in a C-SPAN appearance on Thursday morning. “He, like me, should be talking about how do we make life more affordable for Americans.
“What it’s time for him to do is represent Pennsylvania the way he ran, with the values that he ran on. … Sadly, the work that he is doing now as senator does not reflect those same values.”
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) wrote in a post on X shortly after the video aired that he had used a label for Fetterman a year ago that the appearance confirmed.
“A year ago I labeled John Fetterman ‘Trump’s favorite Democrat,’” Boyle wrote. “Tonight, he yet again proves why.”
McCormick thanked Fetterman in a post on X the same night.
“Thank you to my friend [John Fetterman],” McCormick wrote. “We were both sent to Washington to fight for what’s best for PA. Standing up for steel was never going to be a partisan thing. Grateful for the kind words tonight.”
Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat who was removed from office in 2009 and pardoned by Trump last year, also thanked Fetterman in a post on X, saying the appearance showed which party now speaks for workers.
“As the son of a steel worker & former Democratic Governor, I want to thank Democratic Senator John Fetterman for doing a cameo thanking President Trump for saving the steel industry,” Blagojevich wrote. “Trump’s Republican Party is the party helping working people improve their lives.”
Fetterman first said he would not switch parties in January 2025, after he was the only Democrat to vote to advance Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary.
He said it again in September 2025 in a Fox News interview, describing himself as an independent voice within the party.
In May, he said he would be a “terrible Republican” in a lengthy op-ed in The Washington Post.
In July, he told NBC News that a change to the Democratic platform on Israel would be his breaking point.
“If they put that in our platform—no aid for Israel—and officially become the anti-Israel party, then yeah, that’s a red line for me,” Fetterman said at the time. “Democrats, we always should support Israel. That’s our special ally.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters at the Capitol on July 21 that he and other Republicans had spoken with Fetterman about joining their conference.
“I have had conversations with him in the past, as have many of my colleagues, about the challenges he faces in his caucus,” Thune said.
“And there are many of us who I think would welcome the opportunity to have him join the Republican conference, but ultimately that’s a decision that’s up to him.”
Democrats need to flip four seats on Nov. 3 to take the Senate majority, which would leave Fetterman’s vote as the 51st in a chamber the party would control by a single seat. He is not on the ballot until 2028, and he has said he has not decided whether he will run again or run as a Democrat.
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.
