(Daily Signal)—Control of Congress will be decided over the next seven weeks. Starting today, the Daily Signal is introducing a new show—“Midterm Report”—all about the 2026 elections.
Each week from now through Election Day, I’ll take you inside the races that will decide the majority, alongside the pollsters, strategists, reporters, and candidates who know what’s really happening.
New episodes publish Saturdays on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our Daily Signal website.
Our debut episode covers the first Republican National Committee Midterm Convention, held this week in Dallas, and features two guests who arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion: Republicans need better messaging heading into November.
The GOP’s Enthusiasm Gap
Pollster Brent Buchanan, founder and CEO of Cygnal, opened our first show with a finding that should worry every Republican candidate.
“It’s important to realize that the Republican coalition is two coalitions,” Buchanan said. “You have Trump Republicans who identify with the president, and then you have traditional Republicans who more so identify with the party’s values and the Republican brand itself.”
In Cygnal’s data, roughly 45% of Republicans identify as Trump Republicans. A majority call themselves traditional Republicans. That distinction matters because the two groups are not showing up at the same rate. Buchanan said his polling found 77% of Trump Republicans are excited about the election, compared with 51% of traditional Republicans.
“That’s a 26-point gap within the party,” he said.
Those voters want to hear how Republicans are addressing affordability, Buchanan said. He cited the high cost of health insurance, auto and homeowners insurance, property taxes, and gas prices, and noted that his own company is absorbing a 12.6% increase in health coverage this year.
“They’re just getting pounded from every angle,” he said.
On the president’s proposed $5,000 dividend, he was blunt about why it may not land: “Americans are actually focused on the money going out the door, not the money coming in the door.”
An Opportunity for Republicans
Buchanan also shared Cygnal’s new polling data on socialism.
Among the roughly one-third of Americans who say socialism is an acceptable economic or political identity, 61% cannot name what socialism actually entails, according to his data. Most describe it as an expanded welfare state or a right to housing and health care rather than government ownership of industry.
“The label alone is not going to carry the weight,” Buchanan said. “You have to define the horrible things of socialism.”
He pointed to Michigan’s 7th District, where Rep. Tom Barrett faces a self-described socialist, as a test case. Running on the word won’t work, Buchanan argued. Running on what the candidate has actually said—open the borders, defund the police—will.
“We don’t have to persuade independents to win this election,” he said. “We just have to get our people back off the sidelines and in the game. And when I say our people, I mean traditional Republicans, not Trump Republicans.”
Victor Davis Hanson: ‘They’re Not Getting the Message Out’
Victor Davis Hanson joined me in the second half of the show to discuss his new book, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.”
Not surprisingly, the renowned historian offered a history lesson. In 39 of the last 41 midterm elections, Hanson noted, the party in power loses ground.
He argued the current polling numbers reflect a failure to communicate rather than a failure to govern. Inflation averaged 5.2% during the Biden administration, he said, and is substantially lower now. Voters are angry anyway, because they expected the cumulative price increases of the last four years to reverse, and no one told them that wasn’t possible.
He made a similar argument about Iran, where critics on both ends of the ideological spectrum are attacking the administration.
“We lost 17 people, not 7,000 in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’ve spent $70 billion, not $4 trillion. And this has been six months, not 20 years,” he said. “But I don’t hear anybody saying that.”
He pointed to other issues: deregulation, record foreign investment, energy production, a border that has been closed, the lowest crime rate in decades, and the latest jobs report.
“It’s a pretty good message,” Hanson said, “except for inflation at about 4% and the price of gas and especially diesel fuel. But they’re not getting the message out.”
His forecast is sober. Hanson put the House at a 70-30 proposition against Republicans and called the Senate a coin flip. He sees two things that could move those odds: relentless communication of what the administration has accomplished and drawing a sharp contrast with the socialist turn of Democrats.
“A lot of things [Trump] did were long-term investments,” Hanson said, “but they weren’t ever communicated.”
What’s Ahead
Over the next two months, the “Midterm Report” will bring you Daily Signal reporters from battleground states, new polling, political pundits explaining their party’s prospects, and candidates in the races that will determine the majority.
Subscribe wherever you listen, and sign up for the Daily Signal’s email newsletters, which arrives every day with the latest election coverage from across our team.
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.
