(Just The News)—Four candidates are vying for Tommy Tuberville’s open U.S. Senate seat in Tuesday’s Democratic and Republican primary runoff elections in Alabama. The winners of the two races will face each other in the general election on Nov. 3, in which voters will decide who becomes the next U.S. senator from Alabama.
Tuberville, R-Ala., the former Auburn University football coach, is forgoing reelection to pursue a bid for governor. U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., and former Navy SEAL Jared Hudson are eyeing the Republican nomination for Tuberville’s open Senate seat, while attorney Everett Wess and businessman Dakarai Larriett are seeking to become the Democratic nominee.
Alabama’s Senate seats have been a Republican stronghold for 30 years, apart from Democrat Doug Jones’ brief stint between 2018 and 2021. Republicans are counting on holding Tuberville’s seat in November’s midterm elections as they fight to keep their slim Senate majority.
The non-partisan Cook Political Report rates Alabama’s open Senate seat as “Solid Republican,” meaning whoever becomes the Republican nominee in Tuesday’s race is likely to become Alabama’s next senator in November.
After choosing between 10 candidates across two parties in the statewide primary election on May 19, Alabama voters will head back to the polls for a second time on Tuesday to pick from the top four contenders, two Republicans and two Democrats. A runoff election was necessary because of Alabama’s rule requiring a winning candidate to receive more than 50% of the vote, an unlikely feat in a pool of 10 candidates.
Republican runoff
Republican Moore, who currently represents Alabama’s 1st congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives, led opponent Jared Hudson in last month’s primary, raking in 39.2% of the total Republican vote. Moore clinched President Donald Trump’s endorsement earlier this year.
Posting on social media in January, the president called Moore an “America First Patriot,” and noted that Moore “was the first Elected Official in the Country to Endorse me!”
An endorsement by Trump has been make-or-break for Republican candidates in the midterm season so far and has proven fatal for candidates without it. Moore touted this endorsement to The Center Square.
“With President Trump’s complete endorsement, a double-digit win in the May 19 primary, and the support of Alabama conservatives from Mobile to Muscle Shoals, we’re confident in the campaign we’ve put together and look forward to victory on Tuesday,” Moore said.
Moore is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and has built a voting record as a fiscal hawk during his five-year tenure representing Alabama in Washington, D.C. Alongside other Freedom Caucus members, Moore pushed for deeper spending cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer, but ultimately yielded and voted the bill across the finish line with his party.
Moore is up against political outsider Hudson, a former Navy SEAL and founder of a nonprofit working to combat human trafficking. Hudson has committed to supporting deregulation, codifying cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and cutting taxes for workers and small businesses if elected to the Senate.
Although Hudson did not receive an endorsement from the president, he has focused much of his campaign on being a pro-Trump candidate.
“I will deploy to the Senate to defend President Trump with the same ethos they taught us in SEAL training: I am never out of the fight and I will not fail,” Hudson said on his campaign website.
Despite trailing Moore by more than 13 points in May’s primary, recent polling from The Alabama Poll shows Hudson pulling ahead. Surveying 600 likely Republican runoff voters on May 28, the poll found Hudson leading Moore 48.7% to 39.2%, with 12.1% of the group still undecided.
Moore’s campaign dismissed the survey’s credibility.
“That’s a low-quality poll that was wildly off last time,” a campaign spokesperson told The Center Square. “In its last pre-primary poll, it underestimated Barry’s support by 16%.”
Hudson’s campaign did not respond to The Center Square’s request for comment.
Moore is leading Hudson in campaign fundraising, with funds totaling nearly $3 million compared to Hudson’s $1.8 million, according to the latest filings on the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) website.
Democratic runoff
Two Democrats are competing for Alabama’s open seat in the Senate and face an uphill battle in the traditionally conservative state.
Attorney Wess finished first in the Democratic primary in May with 39.6% of the vote. As the son of a union shipyard worker and veteran, Wess has framed his economic message around this upbringing.
“Those experiences have shaped my commitment to protecting Social Security and Medicare, supporting organized labor, expanding economic opportunity, and ensuring that every Alabamian has a fair shot at the American Dream,” Wess told The Center Square.
Birmingham business owner Dakarai Larriett will also appear on Tuesday’s ballot in the Democratic runoff after finishing 10.5 points behind Wess in the primary. Despite this gap, Larriett’s campaign has raised roughly double the amount Wess has. As of May 27, Larriett reported $147,000 in funds compared to Wess’ $74,000, according to the FEC.
Larriett highlighted his second-place finish as a sign of momentum heading into the runoff.
“The May 19 election demonstrated that Alabama voters resonate with my message of investing in our people through education, healthcare, and economic opportunity,” Larriett said.
Larriett claimed Wess is out of step with Democratic voters, criticizing his policy stances on voting rights and abortion.
“Mr. Wess has made it clear that he does not lead effectively in these areas,” Larriett told The Center Square.
Larriett said he is focusing on a get-out-the-vote campaign ahead of Tuesday’s runoff in key areas of the state.
What to know on Tuesday
Polls will be open on Tuesday in Alabama from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time.
Alabama operates under an open primary system, meaning voters do not have to be registered with a political party to vote in primary elections. Voters are, however, required to choose only one election to vote in on Tuesday, as Alabama does not permit voters to participate in two primary elections on the same day.
Tuesday’s runoffs are separate from Alabama’s special election on Aug. 11, when voters in the 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th congressional districts will head back to the polls to decide between candidates for the House of Representatives under the state’s redrawn congressional map.
The winners of Tuesday’s Republican and Democratic runoff races will go head-to-head in the Nov. 3 general election – on the same ballot where Tuberville seeks to become Alabama’s next governor.
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.
