Republican consultants say that if former President Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot in 2024, it could spell a turnout catastrophe for the GOP next year.
While President Trump is the leading Republican presidential candidate by a long shot according to opinion polls, mounting legal issues could potentially keep him off the ballot. The former president has been indicted multiple times on state and federal charges for a range of issues.
“The conventional wisdom is there’s concern that if Trump’s not the nominee, his coalition will take their ball and go home,” Matt Dole, a Republican strategist in Ohio, told The Hill. “Folks are interested in how that plays out, and so I think right now, they would be happy if Trump’s the nominee—in Ohio, it’s not true across the country—because then his coalition will turn out in November,” he added.
Brian Darling, a Republican strategist and a former aide in the U.S. Senate, said that the GOP would suffer if President Trump is derailed by federal and state criminal prosecutions.
“If somehow he’s not the nominee, it will hurt turnout,” he told The Hill. “He’s got a unique coalition. He brings a lot of nontraditional voters to the Republican Party.” Mr. Darling said it will be difficult for the GOP to win Ohio and other Midwestern states if those Trump voters don’t show up.
Trump Holds Comfortable Lead
A recent poll released by I&I/TIPP shows the former president is far ahead of the pack, leading Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the No. 2 pick, by about 45 percentage points. A New York Times/Siena poll taken earlier in August shows that President Trump is ahead of Mr. DeSantis by about 24 percent nationally.
As a result, Mr. Darling said the former commander-in-chief has a “lock” on the GOP nomination, noting that “the only way he loses if he’s prevented from being on the ballot.”
Highlighting the possible turnout woes for Republicans, David Paleologos, the head of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, told The Hill that about 40 percent of GOP voters who feel confident about who they will cast their ballots for in 2024 are firmly behind the former president.
“Conservatively, it looks like 4 out of 10,” he said. “I haven’t seen many polls where he below 40 [percent].”
“The Trump voters, even from our polling, have pretty much said: ‘It’s Trump or bust,’” Mr. Paleologos said. “There’s a percentage of voters who won’t even vote Republican if he doesn’t get the nomination.”
The GOP worries come about a day after Vice President Kamala Harris told MSNBC over the weekend that she, too, is concerned about voter turnout. Citing election integrity laws that were passed in a range of states over the past two years, she said, “I’m worried about it because I also know that there has been a lot of effort and laws that have been passed to try and make it more difficult for people to vote.”
Other Details
The former president faces three criminal trials in New York City, Washington, and Miami.
A district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton County is expected to bring more charges against him related to his efforts after the 2020 election.
At the same time, President Trump has rejected requests to make a pledge to back the eventual Republican nominee for president if he doesn’t secure the nomination. That move drew the ire of Mr. DeSantis, who signed the loyalty oath to the Republican National Committee earlier this week, which GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has mandated for candidates if they want to appear at the first GOP debate later this month in Milwaukee.
“I wouldn’t sign the pledge,” the former president told Newsmax. “Why would I sign a pledge? There are people on there that I wouldn’t have.”
He added: “I can name three or four people that I wouldn’t support for president. So right there, there’s a problem.”
It’s not clear if President Trump will attend the first debate, scheduled for Aug. 23.
“I mean, these are, you know, very capable people, very good people but why would you do that when you’re leading by so much?” asked President Trump about attending the debate. He then made reference to former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon having skipped out on debates.
For the first debate, reports indicate that Mr. DeSantis, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum will attend the debate. Former Vice President Mike Pence said last Friday that he also will sign the pledge.
As for Mr. DeSantis, he was asked by reporters in Iowa how he will to close the gap with President Trump.
“You work hard,” he said. “We’ve now done 38 of the 99 counties. We did six counties yesterday.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.