(Zero Hedge)—On the night of the 2020 Presidential Elections most Americans recall going to bed feeling certain that Donald Trump had pulled off another solid victory. With Joe Biden drawing mostly small crowds on the campaign trail and spending most of the cycle rarely engaging with the public, it seemed as if Trump was a lock.
When everyone awoke the next morning, they were shocked to discover that Biden was awash in votes from an overnight spike, largely due to mail-in ballots and absentee ballots (at least, that was the narrative). Some called it unprecedented, and the shift completely bucked the vote counts that had been trending throughout election day.
Millions of Americans cried foul; suspicions over the results led to the January 6th protests (which turned into riots after Capitol Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the otherwise peaceful crowd). It felt like a coup, and when the Democrat crackdown over the pandemic escalated, it felt like the end of the country was near.
The same feeling is thick in the air after the 2026 Midterms. The most common retort is that this is now the go-to response for any election loss. Democrats claimed the 2016 election was stolen, Republicans claimed the 2020 election was stolen, the accusations arose again in 2024 and today everything is circling back. But does this mean the suspicions are wrong?
Trump recently ignited media outrage when he suggested that some midterms results were fraudulent. In the case of Texas, he might have a point. Something’s not quite right about these Midterm numbers. Let’s examine the facts for a moment…
First, no voting shift of this magnitude has happened in Texas for at least the past 50 years. Texas, like much of the south, was largely Democrat controlled in the 1970s, but it’s important to keep in mind that southern Democrats at that time were anti-immigration, pro states rights and definitely not the woke creatures we know today.
It wasn’t until the 1990s after a slow process that Texas began to vote Republican, and the basic principles of the state remained intact regardless of the party in charge. The woke ideology of Democrats in our era is completely contrary to these principles, and the abrupt party switch in the recent elections is unprecedented. But lets look at the stats for a moment.
The Polls
After the 2016 and 2024 elections, most intelligent people don’t trust media polls anymore. There is a clear trend of bias in modern polling and far too many election gurus have been caught producing fraudulent numbers, usually in favor of Democrats.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
In Texas, polls have historically underestimated Republicans. In 2022 and 2024, for example, Democrats typically fell short of their polling averages by roughly 3–5 points while Republicans surpassed expectations.
However, in 2026, polls went in the opposite direction by over double the normal point range. The miss on the polls wasn’t three to five points. It was nine in the Senate race. In the governor’s race, it was nearly 11. This is strange, obviously.
Those results are the largest polling misses in modern Texas history, and they ran against the Republicans this time. Not only that, but this massive blue shift happened in the span of only two years.
The Voter Trend
Okay, so the polls were off…by a lot, in the opposite direction of previous trends, but that just means the Republicans really blew it and their voting base was out to get them more than anyone had predicted. This would mean that GOP candidates must have received far less votes than previous elections. Their base must have stayed home, or some conservatives actually voted blue to “teach Trump and the GOP a lesson” over the Iran War, right?
Actually, no. Texas Republican candidates received almost the same number of votes as they did in previous midterms. There was no mass walkout of conservatives and there was no rebellion of people switching their votes to Democrat.
The Republican Governor Greg Abbott maintained a steady average for midterm votes, with his final tally at 4.59 million. From 2022 to 2026, though, Democrats somehow added an extra 2 million votes to their tally for Gina Hinojosa. It’s kind of a miracle for anyone who understands how election trends work. And there is no immediate explanation that makes sense.
In the Texas House, Democrats garnered around 3 million votes in 2022, but skyrocketed to 5.16 million voted in 2026. Again, Republicans kept to their historic average of 4.59 million votes. Where did the extra 2 million votes for Democrats come from?
Texas Democrat Candidates Outperform 2024 Presidential Election Numbers?
Texas Democrats racked up some truly impressive vote counts – A little too impressive. James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa somehow tallied between 5.2 million and 5.4 million votes, which is substantially higher than the number of votes Kamala Harris received in Texas in 2024 (4.8 million).
That is to say, we’re supposed to believe that more Democrat voters came out to the polls for Talarico and Hinojosa than they did for Kamala Harris? Midterm votes always underperform compared to presidential elections, but more Democrats voted in Texas in 2026 than they did in 2024?
Again, where did the extra votes come from if Republicans voted at the same rate?
Voter Participation Increase
The next logical place to look for the source of the 2 million extra votes for Democrats is in the participation rate. In terms of the House, in 2022 there were 7.56 million total votes and 3 million of those went to Democrats. In 2026, there were 9.78 million votes in House elections and 5.15 million for Democrats.
Let’s break this down as clearly as possible because the nature of this event needs to be understood fully: From 2022 to 2026, Texas had a jump of 2.2 million voters in the Midterms. That means, nearly every single new participating voter in 2026 would need to vote Democrat for this result to happen. Many would consider this statistically impossible.
Of those 2.2 million voters, there would normally be at least a portion who would vote Republican according to the averages. But this is nearly a 100% net gain for Democrats. Good luck finding any real world examples of this happening without fraud.
Maybe Liberals Moved To Texas And Changed The Voting Demographics?
We’ve been hearing this theory for a long time – That leftists have been spreading from states like California and, slowly and quietly like rainbow-haired ninjas, they have been taking over red states. Except, the numbers don’t support this theory either.
The bulk of new arrivals to Texas were in the state well before the 2024 election, and the state went deep red. Relocations declined after 2024. Surveys indicate that the majority of new arrivals to Texas are conservatives, not leftists. For example, the tens of thousands of Californians who moved to Texas from 2020 to 2024 had 17-point Republican registration edge.
In fact, the constant droning narrative suggesting that “California transplants” are turning red states blue might have been nothing more than propaganda designed to make conservatives accept an unprecedented blue wave in states like Texas without questioning the numbers. At bottom, the data does not prove out this claim at all.
Foreign Voters Tipped The Scales?
Around 700,000 foreign migrants have moved to Texas since 2022, but only a small portion of them have citizenship and voting rights (less than 100,000). There are a number of documented cases of non-citizens voting illegally in Texas elections. The state has a vetting process for registration and generally people are required to show photo ID at the polls.
It is unlikely that millions of foreign residents voted en masse illegally without Texas officials knowing about it. Unless, there is some kind of well organized fraud taking place. The Democrats got those 2 million extra votes from somewhere; without a stringent investigation, finding out the details is difficult.
Did deportation policies anger voters into action to stop Trump? No. Republicans consistently survey well on the issue of immigration and the majority of Americans want deportations to continue. There are nuances (around 50% of the country want deportations for all illegals, while 80% of Americans support targeted deportations), but immigration enforcement is not what brought down Republicans in the Midterms.
The Takeover Is Permanent?
Yes, this is the intention, and Democrats don’t plan to leave power again after 2026. It’s not just the numbers that draw suspicion of chicanery, it’s the rhetoric of leftists. If you want to know what the real plan is for Democrats, take a gander at the new Texas House Majority Leader and what he has to say about the near future of America.
The concern is that the country will have a repeat of the Biden era, with ramped up inflation, mass censorship, trans programs for children, DEI in most institutions and a return to mass immigration. Why? Because Democrats openly admit these are their goals.
Maybe the midterms are completely above board. Maybe this event was nothing more than the most irregular and fantastic upset of red states in recent history. Or, maybe something else is going on. The data is not comforting.
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.
