(Just The News)—A record 19 million Texans are registered to vote this election cycle ahead of the midterm elections.
Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden announced that Texas has 19,041,684 registered voters ahead of the Nov. 3 election, the most in state history.
Those registered represent more than half of the population, which surpassed 31.7 million last year, according to U.S. Census data.
“Texas continues to see strong voter registration numbers, and we want every eligible Texan to be prepared to participate in the upcoming election,” Howden said in a statement. “Whether you are a first-time voter or have been casting ballots for decades, I encourage you to make a plan to vote, familiarize yourself with the candidates and issues on your ballot, and take advantage of the resources available at VoteTexas.gov.”
As more people have moved to Texas and its population has surged, more people have registered to vote. The total number registered to vote in Texas for this election cycle represents a 2.2% increase from the November 2024 election and a 2% increase from the March 2026 primary election, according to SOS data.
Th number and growth is a marked shift from over the last two decades when voter registration remained relatively flat, hovering around 13 million.
Ten years ago, more than 13.4 people were registered to vote for the November 2016 general election. In November 2006, there were barely 13 million registered voters in Texas, according to SOS data.
Howden made the announcement just days before early voting begins on Monday, Oct. 19. Early voting extends through Friday, Oct. 30. Election Day is Nov. 3.
During early voting, registered voters may cast their ballots at any early voting polling location in their county of registration.
“Early voting gives Texans the flexibility to cast their ballots at a time and location that works best for them,” Howden said.
For those eligible to vote by mail, the deadline for election officials to receive an application for a ballot by mail is Friday, Oct. 23. Howden is encouraging eligible voters to submit their applications as soon as possible to allow adequate time for processing, mailing and returning their ballots.
The voter registration record was broken after at least 178,000 voter registration applications never reached county election offices due to a Texas Department of Public Safety database error. That error has since been corrected.
Over the past year, there was a 500,000-voter registration application backlog, according to a Dallas Morning News tracker.
The SOS, Texas Department of Public Safety and state lawmakers have acknowledged that applications never reaching counties stemmed from a new voter registration management system being implemented. After a system overhaul was launched July 2025, as early as last October is when voter registration information wasn’t sent to counties, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said. He began working with state and county officials to ensure the backlog and underlying issue was corrected, The Center Square reported.
As of Oct. 15, the voter registration backlog had been cleared, Bettencourt said.
“Texas counties have cleared a several hundred thousand voter registration backlog from a DPS software update error late last year through lots of catch-up work across the state,” he said. In Texas’ largest county, Harris County, which Bettencourt represents, the county registrar said it alone cleared an additional 108,000 voter registration backlog sent from the SOS.
Bettencourt said the legislature would hold hearings to investigate “the two Agencies’ SNAFU that caused this problem, but clearly, a vendor software update triggered the problem that does need a permanent fix by contractors and agency personnel alike.”
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.
