(Daily Signal)—President Donald Trump has held campaign-style events in 17 states, most of them key swing states, in preparation for the 2026 midterm elections.
While most presidents have a minimal presence in midterm elections, chief of staff Susie Wiles said in December that Trump would keep a presidential-style campaign schedule for 2026.
“Typically in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House. You localize the election and you keep the federal officials out of it,” Wiles said. “We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot, because so many of those low-propensity voters are Trump voters.”
As a result, Trump has made multiple visits per month to key states where he has touted economic wins, such as investments in domestic manufacturing, baby bonus accounts, and tax cuts from the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Many of the states are home to toss-up congressional races critical to maintaining the already slim Republican House majority.
“President Trump is hitting the road with unmatched energy to build enthusiasm because he understands what’s at stake this November,” Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters told the Daily Signal. “President Trump is taking charge and delivering the America First message directly to voters, and when they are presented with the facts, voters will reject the Socialists’ radical agenda and elect Republicans up and down the ballot.”
Trump addressed three events in Florida this year, where Republicans have the chance to flip several blue seats after the Legislature successfully redrew the state’s congressional maps. The seats include the 9th District; the 22nd District, as Democrat Lois Frankel decided to run in the 23rd District; and the 14th District, currently represented by Democrat Kathy Castor.
Trump has also visited twice each of the swing states Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Georgia is home to a key Senate race, where Republican Rep. Mike Collins is taking on Democrat incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, viewed as one of the most vulnerable Democrat Senate incumbents.
Michigan features three key House races and one Senate race, where Bernie Sanders-backed candidate Abdul El-Sayed is expected to win the Democratic nomination next Tuesday.
The House races in Michigan could determine which party will control the House, Mitchell said.
“You’ve got the seventh district with Tom Barrett in the Lansing area,” he said. “That’s a very very close seat, one of the closest in the nation. Then you’ve got John James, who’s running for governor, who represents the 10th district, which is Macomb County primarily, and a little bit of Oakland County in the Detroit suburban area.”
“On the west side of the state, there’s Bill Huizinga, who’s in the 4th congressional district, and he could get into trouble if this becomes a sort of wave election,” Mitchell continued.
Pennsylvania has four tossup districts currently represented by Republicans: the 1st Congressional District represented by Brian Fitzpatrick; the 7th district represented by Ryan Mackenzie; the 8th district represented by Rob Bresnahan, and the 10th represented by Scott Perry.
Trump visited Pennsylvania to energize his base, said Jim Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling, which is based in Pennsylvania.
“Trump’s visits to Pennsylvania are a way to try to fire up the base to get the GOP electorate tuned in to the election because it’s only a short three months away, to make sure they’re galvanized and ready to turn out,” he told the Daily Signal.
Lee said polls have found an excitement gap between Democrat and Republican voters. Even though economic data suggests the country is on strong footing, people are still feeling the pain of inflation, Lee said.
“They’re not saving as much money as they had been in the past,” he said, “so there’s a lot of apathy, particularly among former Trump supporters, and we’re seeing that because in our polling, Republicans don’t seem to be as committed to vote for Republican candidates, whether it’s for a governor, for a U.S. Senate race, or for congressional races.”
Trump has made one trip each to Kentucky; Ohio; Texas; North Carolina; Iowa; Tennessee; Nevada; Arizona; New York; Wisconsin; Connecticut; North Dakota; and South Dakota.
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.
