(The Epoch Times)—New Hampshire voters have sent former Republican U.S. Sen. John Sununu and Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas to battle it out for the open New Hampshire Senate seat in November.
Voters chose from a crowded field of contestants for a seat that both parties consider key to their plans to control the upper chamber of Congress.
On the Republican ballot, Sununu and former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, along with six other candidates, vied for the nomination.
Sununu won a New Hampshire Senate seat in 2002, defeating then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. Shaheen defeated Sununu in their 2008 rematch.
Brown, meanwhile, was elected in Massachusetts in 2010 to serve out the three remaining years of the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy’s final term.
However, he was defeated in 2012 and so never took on a full term. Brown moved to New Hampshire and challenged Shaheen in 2014, losing only narrowly.
Brown endorsed President Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign, and the president later appointed him ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa during his first term.
In this primary election, however, Trump backed Sununu. This is despite Sununu’s endorsement of Trump rival Nikki Haley in the 2024 election.
Sununu’s campaign outraised Brown’s, taking in $4.1 million to Brown’s $2.2 million.
On the Democratic side, Pappas was seen as the front-runner and gathered support from many high-profile Democrats, including Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), former Gov. John Lynch, and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The lawmaker has served in the House since 2019 but has held public office consistently since graduating from college in 2002.
Pappas defeated Republican Karoline Leavitt, then-Trump White House press aide who later became White House press secretary, in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District in the 2022 election.
Self-proclaimed Independent progressive voter Timothy Willis held signs encouraging voters to “vote [for] progressives” outside a polling location. He told The Epoch Times that he supports Democrat Karishma Manzur for Senate.
Willis said he has voted for Pappas in the past, but more information has come to light about Pappas and his support from PACs, or political action committees, and what Willis sees as a disconnect from voters.
“When they had a debate at Channel Nine in New Hampshire the other night, and Karishma got out and greeted her supporters. Chris Pappas just ignored his supporters and went right in. He just does not seem too genuine.”
Willis said he isn’t at all sure Manzur would win in November, but he thinks it’s important to be proactive. The activist said he doesn’t subscribe to the notion that voters should “just hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.”
“We have to fight. We have to be more proactive, and we just need to get it done.”
Merrimack County Attorney candidate Meg Hagaman, a Republican, stood with Democratic New Hampshire House candidate Tracy Bricchi and told The Epoch Times that they’re voting for Sununu and Pappas, respectively.
Bricchi said she is voting for Pappas because she believes “he has the best interests of New Hampshire people in mind,” and that his political history shows a person who has “done his best given the climate that he’s worked in.”
When asked if she thinks Pappas can win in November, she took a lengthy pause before saying hesitantly, “I have to say yes.”
Hagaman, however, said she supports Sununu due to his “sensible leadership skills.”
“We know he’s already had experience in the Senate,” Hagaman told The Epoch Times. “He’s had a lot of experience governing, and I think he is someone who wants to put New Hampshire’s people first. And I think he will go to Washington with a lot of sensible thoughts.”
Four other candidates also hoped to take the Democratic nomination, including Manzur, a progressive activist and democratic socialist.
Polling from the University of New Hampshire shows that Pappas still held the lead as of late August.
Shaheen, 79, announced in March 2025 that she wouldn’t seek reelection. She was the first woman to serve as both governor and senator in the United States.
Also on the ballot are nominees for governor, the U.S. House of Representatives, and other state offices.
In addition to the New Hampshire seat, Republicans are targeting the two Senate seats held by Democrats Gary Peters of Michigan and Tina Smith of Minnesota, who are also retiring.
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.
