Chris Christie was the last New Jersey governor to wear the Republican mantle. And while most actual Republicans consider Christie to be a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only), he was able to win and hold office. Before him, we’d have to go back to the 9/11 era.
New Jersey’s gubernatorial showdown between Republican Jack Ciattarelli and Democrat Mikie Sherrill has turned into a nail-biter, with a fresh poll revealing the two candidates locked in a virtual dead heat just days before voters head to the ballot box on November 4.
The AtlasIntel survey, taken from October 25 to 30 among 1,639 likely voters, pegs Sherrill at 50.2 percent and Ciattarelli at 49.3 percent, well within the poll’s ±2 percent margin of error.
Women lean toward Sherrill by 58.7 percent to Ciattarelli’s 40.6 percent, while men favor Ciattarelli 59.3 percent to her 40.5 percent. Party loyalty runs strong, with Sherrill claiming 94.7 percent of Democrats and Ciattarelli securing 96.2 percent of Republicans, though each pulls a sliver from the other’s base—3.5 percent of Republicans for her and 4.7 percent of Democrats for him.
This tight margin echoes a New Jersey Globe report on the same poll, describing it as a 50-49 edge for Sherrill that amounts to a statistical tie. Yet other recent surveys paint a varied picture. A Quinnipiac poll from a few days earlier gives Sherrill a wider 51-43 lead, while an Emerson College/PIX11/The Hill effort shows her up by just one point.
The New York Post notes Ciattarelli gaining ground in the final stretch, suggesting momentum that could upend expectations in a state long dominated by Democrats.
Sherrill, a Congresswoman and former Navy helicopter pilot, has faced mounting scrutiny over her time at the U.S. Naval Academy. Reports detail her involvement in a 1994 cheating scandal that prevented her from walking at graduation, with critics pointing to shifting explanations and her refusal to release full disciplinary records. A classmate, Brent Sadler, told Fox News that her punishment indicates deeper ties to the incident than she admits: “She lied.”
Adding fuel to the fire, Sherrill voted in September to condemn the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk but followed up with a statement blasting his views as “vile and disgusting.”
This drew sharp rebukes from Republicans, who accused her of politicizing a tragedy that shocked the nation, as detailed in coverage from NJ.com and Fox News. The incident has alienated voters across the spectrum, contributing to her sliding numbers.
On the flip side, Ciattarelli, a businessman who narrowly lost the 2021 race to Gov. Phil Murphy, is riding a wave of cross-party appeal. Early voting data shows Republicans outpacing Democrats in ballot returns, a red flag for Sherrill’s camp.
He’s picked up endorsements from notable Democrats, including Branchville Councilman Jeff Lewis, who said, “All she keeps running with her commercials is the fact she’s a helicopter pilot and a mom of four, and she thinks she’s going to be able to lower electrical bills, which I think she’s going to have a very hard time doing.”
Garfield Mayor Everett E. Garnto Jr. also switched sides in September, ditching his party to back Ciattarelli.
At a recent rally, Ciattarelli touted these developments: “There are positive signs everywhere that we’re going to win this race. Number one, have you seen the recent polls?”
He added that his campaign is “out-fundraising” and “out-energizing” Sherrill, and noted, “We picked up the endorsement of another prominent Democrat. A former State Assemblyperson from Hudson County. When Democrats are endorsing the Republican nominee, it tells you we’re winning this race.”
As The Guardian observes, national issues like Trump-era policies are casting a shadow over the contest, potentially previewing 2026 midterms. High-profile Democrats, including former President Obama, have rushed in to bolster Sherrill amid the tightening polls. But with independents and disaffected voters in play, Ciattarelli’s focus on taxes, energy costs, and law enforcement could tip the scales in a state weary of one-party rule.
Voters will decide soon whether New Jersey sticks with the status quo or charts a new course. In an odd election cycle, this will also be a bellwether for 2026. If Republicans can take over a blue state, it bodes well for next year’s prospects. If not, Democrats will have demonstrated they can hold the line when it counts.
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.
Red, Blue, it doesn’t matter which. The results are always the same. All Trump is, is Biden2.
Hopefully the voters of New Jersey will recognize the common sense candidate and vote for Ciattarelli. The democrats and murphy have ruined New Jersey.
Correct, I think voters are waking up it is the liberal news outlets that are trying to hide that fact.
BS nonsense.
Is your post purposefully ignorant? I cannot believe anyone would actually believe what you posted. If you don’t see the vast, breathtaking difference between the Biden presidency and the Trump presidency, you are either willfully ignorant or you are just simply a mindless automaton with minimum awareness waiting to be told what to think.
The only way that can happen is if the election is clean and fair, ID and all and on one day.
Democrats control the computerized voting machines. The vote will be whatever they want.
Trust me, the Marxist morons in New Jersey will never go red, although the party colors should be reversed. They are the reds, like their associated scum in New York and CA. The only good democrat is a DEAD democrat, and the same for most of the governors, mayors and judges.
Man NJ is such a cesspool
Trenton and Freehold needs to be drained
Frank Pallone and his brother need to get purged from Long Branch(which extends to other cities)
They bribe and collude with Judges and Attorneys
They steal taxpayer money
They literally siphon money from engineering projects
Not all dems are criminals but All Criminals are democrats is how Musk put it
fat chance with all the baked in cheating and vote fraud
“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” — Joseph Stalin
In New Jersey, most of the vote counting is controlled by Democrats, with no transparency or access to the systems and methods they use. And no possibility of a genuine audit. So “margin of error” in a poll is just an amusing distraction.
Even if he wins? How will anyone be able to tell the difference?