(DCNF)—Republican super political action committees (PACs) have been forced to spend staggering amounts of money to rescue candidates in traditionally safe constituencies.
The GOP was spending record-breaking sums of money in red states and districts that President Donald Trump won by double digits in the 2024 presidential election. The party has grown increasingly worried that historically safe Republican states such as Texas, Ohio, Iowa and Alaska have turned into must-defend races in the midterms, which in turn led the party to spend less time and resources in other tossup races.
Three Trump-aligned groups, MAGA Inc., the No Going Back PAC and the Safety and Affordability PAC spent more than $163 million on advertising and air time since Sept. 1, according to KARK, an NBC News affiliate. The PACs spent nearly 40% of that money in states and districts where Trump won by at least ten percentage points in the 2024 presidential election, amounting to $63 million.
In Texas, Republicans expected to spend between $150 million and $200 million to save Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton from losing to Democratic Texas Senate nominee James Talarico, according to Punchbowl News. Texas PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund’s super PAC in Texas, will spend over $100 million in television advertisements to support Paxton after adding over $35 million to its $65 million in TV reservations.
The Texas Senate race was considered a “toss up” as of Aug. 20, according to the Cook Political Report. Talarico came under fire for identifying his favorite drag queen, claiming God was “non-binary” and that trans-identifying children were “God’s children” and “loved beyond measure.”
Paxton was embroiled in a long list of ethical and personal controversies, which included a proposed plea deal that would have allowed a man who admitted to sexually abusing a young boy to serve only one day in jail. His ex-wife, Republican Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce in July 2025 over an extramarital affair.
No Going Back PAC Inc. announced it would spend $49 million on ads for seven races, including $15 million in Michigan, $11 million in Ohio, $10 million in New Hampshire and $4 million in Maine.
Ohio was the most expensive Senate race thus far, drawing more than $307 million on ads from both parties combined.
Republicans spent over $152 million to defend Republican Ohio Sen. Jon Husted against former Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who was running to flip Husted’s seat. Fairshake, a crypto super PAC, spent $30 million to oppose Brown, who has been a longtime crypto critic.
More than $110 million in Republican ad bookings since Aug. 1 have gone into House districts Trump won by double digits, including embattled Republican Ohio Rep. Max Miller’s district, who faced domestic violence allegations. The Congressional Leadership Fund placed a $4.85 million ad buy scheduled from Sept. 30 to Nov. 3 to support Miller against his competitive run against Democratic Ohio congressional nominee Brian Poindexter.
In Iowa, Republicans booked about $73 million in ads to bolster Republican candidates, including Republican Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson in her race against Democratic nominee Josh Turek.
Conservative political commentator and Iowa native Steve Deace issued dire warnings for Republican candidates in Iowa, arguing that the Iran war “has become a 2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross.”
“Yesterday, Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006 … Whatever we’re doing or not doing in Iran/Hormuz has become a 2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross,” Deace said. “This is approaching TARP bailout levels of unpopular in my home state. We are risking what’s left of the Trump presidency on this, because if Democrats take control the legislative branch the Trump domestic agenda we all voted for will largely cease between what a Democrat Congress will do and the courts have already been doing.”
Republican and Trump-aligned groups booked around $36.4 million in Senate ads versus the $21.6 million reserved by Democrats in Alaska, where Republican Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan faces a competitive matchup against former Democratic Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola, according to Punchbowl News. Sullivan will face off with another candidate with the same name on a ranked choice ballot, whom Republicans alleged purposefully entered the race to confuse voters and help Peltola win.
Former aides alleged they experienced profane outbursts from Peltola, according to The New York Times. She allegedly shoved a staffer, required aides to feed live crickets to her pet chameleon and sent text messages calling a commercial fishery executive a “retard” when he posted a selfie with her.
The Senate Leadership Fund reserved $15 million for Alaska’s Senate race in April. The group added $6 million in Michigan to help former Republican Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, $4 million to help elect Hinson and $2 million in Alaska to help Sullivan in August, according to a press release.
Vice President J.D. Vance, who previously held Husted’s seat, campaigned in Ohio, Iowa, Maine, Kansas and North Carolina to back Republican candidates. He traveled to Kansas to campaign for Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, who was facing a challenge against Democratic Kansas Senate nominee Adam Hamilton.
Kansas has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, when former Democratic Kansas Sen. George McGill won his election. He finished his term in January 1939.
Marshall’s chances of reelection remained up in the air after reports found that he sued more than 700 patients for unpaid bills while practicing as an OB-GYN, leading to 81 arrests, according to The New York Times.
Vance lightly addressed the allegations during a rally in support of Marshall.
“In Doc Marshall, you have a man who devoted his life to delivering babies and making sure that moms and children from every walk of life were safe and had the healthcare that they need,” Vance said at Webco Manufacturing. “So I ask you this November to stand for a man who stood for moms and babies, to stand for a man who stood for all Kansas. Let’s stand for Doc Marshall and send the crazy people packing, ladies and gentlemen. Elect Roger Marshall to the U.S. Senate.”
Vance campaigned in Iowa on Sept. 18 to support Republican Iowa gubernatorial nominee Zach Lahn and Rep. Zach Nunn, one of the most endangered incumbents this cycle.
The tech industry, sports betting groups, billionaires and special interest groups poured $1.2 billion into MAGA Inc., Fairshake, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and others ahead of the midterms.
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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.
