(DCNF)—Polling for races in Michigan and Wisconsin did not accurately reflect the actual election results due to open primaries and the willingness from the further-left candidates’ bases to be surveyed, pollsters said.
Surveys indicated that Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Democratic Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong held double digit leads ahead of their primaries, although El-Sayed narrowly won his race and Hong lost. Pollsters stated it was difficult to properly conduct surveys in these states because of their open primaries, while supporters of further-left candidates are more enthusiastic and willing to participate in polls.
An Emerson College Polling/WLNS/WOODTV survey, a Mitchell Research & Communications poll and other polls indicated El-Sayed led Democratic Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens by over 20 points. El-Sayed only beat Stevens by one point, 48.5% to 47.5%.
In open primary elections, it is difficult to determine likely Democratic voters since Republicans and independents can vote in Democratic primaries. Eli McKown-Dawson, a senior elections analyst at Silver Bulletin, told the Daily Caller News Foundation it was difficult to poll in Michigan and Wisconsin because they hold open primaries, meaning voters do not register with a political party.
“The polls in Wisconsin and Michigan did miss in a big way. But primary polls in general are more prone to error than polls of general elections. For example, the average polling error in polls of presidential primaries historically is about 9 points. It’s even higher, easily in the double digits on average, in polls of House and Senate primaries. So, while the misses in Wisconsin and Michigan were large, they weren’t extreme outliers for a primary,” McKown-Dawson told the DCNF.
“That’s because primaries are just harder to poll than general elections. Increasingly, polls rely on weighting and other kinds of statistical modeling to produce their final samples,” McKown-Dawson continued. “But many of the variables pollsters use to benchmark their general election polls aren’t available for primaries. It’s especially difficult in Wisconsin and Michigan because both states hold open primaries, meaning voters don’t need to be registered with a particular party to participate in its primary.”
The polls in both races surveyed too many young people and voters who were enthusiastic about the election, who tend to vote for further-left candidates like El-Sayed and Hong.
“It also looks like polls of both races contained too many young voters, and too many voters who were very enthusiastic about the election. That can be a general problem with polls that are increasingly conducted online or via text, if they’re missing anyone, it’s often older voters. In both Wisconsin and Michigan, younger more enthusiastic voters were the exact coalition who were fired up about Hong and El-Sayed, respectively,” McKown-Dawson said.
Democratic pollster Adam Carlson, the founding partner of Zenith Research, also wrote in a post-mortem of the Michigan primary that El-Sayed’s base was more “fired up” and willing to be surveyed. However, enthusiasm before Election Day does not mean more votes at the ballot box.
“Now, in a state like Michigan that has open primaries, it’s notoriously very difficult to nail the electorate/gauge who is voting in each primary,” Carlson wrote. “There was a competitive Republican gubernatorial primary this time, but turnout was 65% higher on the Democratic side than on the Republican side … “El-Sayed’s supporters were more fired up and willing to take polls down the stretch, but more enthusiasm does not necessarily equal more votes.”
Carlson also argued his poll misrepresented seniors, voters with a household income less than $50,000 per year and Republicans who may have voted for Stevens to stop El-Sayed from winning. He suggested that pollsters in Michigan should “err on the side of an older electorate” and pay close attention to party identification and income.
Stevens won the older, non-college educated and lower-to-middle income electorate, while El-Sayed was most successful in counties with white, college educated and higher-income populations. The congresswoman ran as the moderate candidate, campaigning on reforming rather than abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, implementing a public option over Medicare for All and expressing strong support for Israel.
El-Sayed received endorsements from the anti-establishment, including independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cotez and Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer quietly endorsed Stevens and asked party donors to support her, according to The New York Times.
In Wisconsin, several surveys published by State Navigate, Marquette University and Public Policy Polling repeatedly showed Hong leading her opponent, Democratic Wisconsin gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, by over 20 points. Crowley defeated Hong by less than 1% in Tuesday’s election.
Pollster G. Elliot Morris wrote the average error of a Senate or gubernatorial primary is around 13 points. He explained that the polls misinterpreted the average age and ideology of most of the voters. State Navigate, which conducted polls in Wisconsin, described a much younger electorate than the ones that show up to an August primary.
“It looks like both of these processes failed to anticipate an older, more moderate primary electorate. Or, at the least, weighting to a slightly older benchmark would have improved performance,” Morris wrote for State Navigate.
Among voters with a known age, the primary electorate was about 52% to 53% seniors, while 2% to 3% were under 30, Morris said. The poll sample in July consisted of 36% senior and 17% were under 30.
The August survey was also a recontact survey, meaning it polled the same participants who responded in July. It appeared that Crowley gained momentum later in the election cycle, meaning the polls did not accurately reflect his base’s support.
In 2016 and 2024, polls misrepresented the types of Democrats and Republicans who turned out on Election Day, Morris wrote. Moderate Democrats and Republicans were more likely to refuse pollsters, and it appeared that Hong’s supporters were more willing to answer.
“The right reading of this is that primary polling is hard in ways that general-election polling is not. It is reassuring that most of the 20-point miss by the polls came from two problems that are either (1) fixable (weighting model) or (2) unavoidable in primaries (late movement), rather than, e.g., pervasive non-response by moderates,” Morris wrote. “The first problem is fixable with accurate voter-file targets (and bias is further reduced with some handy guesswork about ideology and income). The second is fixable by fielding later — and by everyone, poll-readers included, treating a primary poll as a snapshot with a very short shelf life.”
A Marquette Law School poll found that 34% of respondents were undecided on how they would vote in late July. It appeared that undecided voters wound up supporting Crowley at the last minute, which likely helped push him across the finish line.
McKown-Dawson told the DCNF that primary elections change rapidly, adding there were many undecided voters up until Election Day.
“In Wisconsin, for example, you had candidates drop out quite late, and the eventual winner got back into the race just a few weeks before Election Day. It can be hard for polls to pick up late-breaking movement like that, especially when many voters were undecided even in the final pre-election polls,” McKown-Dawson told the DCNF.
“Pod Save America” co-host Dan Pfeiffer explained on X why he believed undecided voters likely picked Crowley over Hong.
“Crowley and Evers made electability a central issue down the stretch, and Hong’s media tour, trying to explain her past tweets, amplified voters’ concerns about her ability to beat Tiffany,” Pfeiffer said. “Bernie and AOC not endorsing further raised questions.”
Hong called on Thanksgiving to be cancelled in a November 2020 X post, claiming Americans should stop “celebrating colonialism.” She said on Election Day that she would not cancel the holiday.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez did not campaign with Hong ahead of the primary.
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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.
