New Jersey hasn’t elected a Republican governor since RINO Chris Christie left office in 2018. For years, pundits have written off the Garden State as a Democratic stronghold where Republican campaigns go to die. Yet this year’s gubernatorial race tells a different story. Jack Ciattarelli, the former assemblyman who nearly defeated Phil Murphy in 2021, is back — and this time, he’s facing Democrat Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill. Against most expectations, the race is suddenly competitive, and even some Democrats are breaking ranks to endorse him.
It’s a remarkable turn for a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly a million registered voters. But New Jersey isn’t the same place it was a decade ago. Skyrocketing taxes, an exodus of small businesses, and growing discontent over the cultural and moral direction of the state have created an undercurrent of frustration.
Voters who once saw the GOP as irrelevant are beginning to reconsider. Ciattarelli, a lifelong New Jerseyan and small-business owner, has tapped into that unease with a campaign rooted in fiscal sanity, parental rights, and restoring local control to communities long ignored by the political elite.
The latest Fairleigh Dickinson University poll shows Ciattarelli within striking distance of Sherrill, with support swelling not only among Republicans but also independents and even some Democrats. Several local Democrat officials — frustrated by rising costs and heavy-handed state mandates — have crossed party lines to back him. Their reasoning is straightforward: New Jersey cannot afford another four years of ideological governance that prioritizes political correctness over practicality.
Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor and Navy helicopter pilot, was once hailed by the media as a “moderate.” But her voting record in Congress and her campaign rhetoric tell another story. She embraced the Biden-Harris agenda almost entirely — from aggressive climate mandates and expanded government spending to aligning with teachers’ unions that push radical gender curricula in public schools. To many suburban parents, that’s not moderation — it’s extremism dressed up in polite language.
That issue, perhaps more than any other, has defined the contrast between the two candidates. Ciattarelli has pledged to return decision-making power to parents, insisting that moral and religious values belong in the home, not dictated by bureaucrats in Trenton.
He has also vowed to reform New Jersey’s tax code, which remains one of the most punishing in the country, driving middle-class families and retirees out of the state in droves. His plan calls for property tax relief, regulatory reform, and a renewed focus on making New Jersey competitive again — not a playground for political insiders.
There’s a moral clarity to Ciattarelli’s message that feels rare in modern politics. He doesn’t speak like a man auditioning for cable news clips. He speaks like a neighbor who knows what it costs to raise a family, run a business, and try to stay afloat in a system designed to punish productivity. And that authenticity — combined with the national fatigue toward partisan extremism — could be the key to unlocking blue states like New Jersey.
For all her credentials, Sherrill represents the continuation of a Democrat establishment that has grown increasingly detached from ordinary people. Her campaign emphasizes “protecting democracy” and “climate justice,” but those abstract slogans do little to comfort parents worried about the safety of their neighborhoods or seniors struggling to keep up with property taxes. In a state that once prided itself on grit and common sense, that disconnect is glaring.
New Jersey may or may not be ready to flip red — but it is clearly restless. Voters are signaling that they want competence over ideology, solutions over soundbites, and humility over hubris. Ciattarelli’s campaign is giving voice to that sentiment, and his growing bipartisan coalition suggests that something deeper is at play. People are tired of being managed by elites who claim to know better. They’re ready for someone who still believes in self-government — in the idea that faith, family, and freedom aren’t relics, but the foundation of American life.
If Jack Ciattarelli manages to break through New Jersey’s blue wall, it won’t just be a political upset. It will be a cultural reckoning — proof that even in places long written off as lost causes, the American spirit still refuses to bow. The voters of New Jersey are being given a choice: continue down a path of bureaucratic decline and moral confusion, or chart a new one built on accountability, decency, and courage.
And perhaps, just perhaps, they’re ready to make that choice.
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.
NJ voters are traditional conservatives. The machine is Commie-left.
So the Commie S-elects people like Booker, who didn’t even have a NJ address. And the replacement for Menendez.
But the hard-working people in NJ can/will elect Ciatarelli.
If voters vote for him, he can win. What a SILLY HEADLINE QUESTION.
OF COURSE HE CAN WIN. Dear voters. Don’t vote with who you think will or won’t win. VOTE FOR THE BEST CANDIDATE. IN THIS CASE, CIATARELLI.