(DCNF)—Senate Republicans are crafting an ambitious strategy to expand their 53-seat majority during the 2026 midterms.
Though midterms historically have favored the party not in the White House, Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who is leading the Senate GOP’s campaign arm during the 2026 cycle, laid out a roadmap to grow the party’s ranks to 55 members during the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s (NRSC) weekend retreat in Florida, according to Punchbowl News.
Scott is reportedly focused on defending GOP incumbents in Maine, North Carolina and Ohio and going on offense to flip two Democratic-held seats in swing states President Donald Trump won in 2024: Michigan and Georgia.
If Scott is able to defend every GOP incumbent and flip two senate seats, Senate Republicans would have their largest majority since former President George W. Bush’s second term. The Senate GOP’s campaign arm is also reportedly eyeing Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Ben Ray Lújan of New Mexico and Tina Smith of Minnesota as potential targets.
The NRSC is likely to invest heavily in the five following races to defend potentially vulnerable incumbents and expand the GOP’s senate majority.
Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff
Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff is one of the NRSC’s top targets during the upcoming midterms and would likely be vulnerable to a strong Republican challenger.
Two-term Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who has an approval rating north of 60%, is seen as an obvious choice to challenge Ossoff. Kemp leads Ossoff 46% to 40% in a hypothetical matchup with 14% undecided, according to a January Club for Growth poll shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Republican Georgia Reps. Buddy Carter, Mike Collins and Rich McCormick could also get into the race.
Despite running in a swing-state President Donald Trump won, Ossoff has largely refrained from voting for the president’s cabinet nominees, according to a DCNF review of senators’ roll call votes.
Ossoff has voted for just two of Trump’s nominees — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe — and skipped votes on Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
Though Ossoff voted for the Laken Riley Act, a bill intended to crack down on illegal immigration, he joined with his Democratic colleagues to block legislation sanctioning International Criminal Court officials for seeking to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ossoff also cast two procedural votes last December that would have restricted certain weapon sales to Israel.
Ossoff narrowly won his first Senate election in the state by just 55,000 votes during a runoff against former Republican Georgia Sen. David Perdue in January 2021.
The Democratic incumbent’s campaign has nearly $5 million on hand, according to FEC data.
Retiring Democratic Michigan Sen. Gary Peters
Two-term Democratic Michigan Sen. Gary Peters’ announcement that he would not seek reelection on Jan. 28 gave the NRSC a boost to flip the open seat to add to the Senate GOP’s majority.
Though Senate Republicans failed to secure the state’s open seat last November with Democratic Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin narrowly defeating GOP candidate Mike Rogers, Trump’s strong electoral performance in the state could give Republicans optimism that 2026 will yield better results.
Rogers, a former Republican congressman who served in the House from 2001 to 2015 and secured Trump’s endorsement during his 2024 senatorial run, told Fox News on Jan. 30 that he is considering a run for the open seat.
Rogers’ campaign committee ended 2024 with nearly $2 million on hand, according to FEC data.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is one of many potential Democratic candidates considering jumping into the race, according to multiple reports, though he could face carpetbagger allegations due to relocating to the state less than three years ago.
Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins
Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins, generally seen as the most moderate member of the Republican conference, could be the most endangered Republican incumbent heading into the 2026 cycle. Former Vice President Kamala Harris defeated Trump in the state by nearly seven percentage points.
Collins, chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, announced she intends to run for a sixth Senate term last November. Her campaign has more than $2.5 million in the bank, according to FEC disclosure data. The NRSC is likely to invest heavily in the race.
Two-term Democratic Maine Governor Janet Mills, who Collins’ team has acknowledged would be a formidable candidate, has not ruled out challenging Collins for the seat.
Collins, who represents a reliably blue state at the presidential level, has been willing to cross Trump in the past. She has voted for every Trump cabinet nominee so far except Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Collins defied electoral odds in 2020 by winning her contest by nearly 10 percentage points despite former President Joe Biden winning Maine by roughly 7%. Every poll listed by the RealClearPolitics aggregate during the final weeks of the race between Collins and her Democratic challenger Sarah Gideon showed the Republican incumbent heading for a decisive loss.
Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis
The Senate GOP’s campaign arm is also likely to invest heavily to defend Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis from a potentially competitive primary and general election contest.
Former Democratic North Carolina Roy Cooper has not ruled out challenging Tillis in what would likely be a competitive general election. Cooper notably won gubernatorial elections in 2016 and 2020 despite Trump being at the top of the presidential ticket and winning the state both cycles.
Tillis has voted for all of Trump’s cabinet nominees thus far despite reportedly wavering on Hegseth’s nomination in the final hours before the confirmation vote. The senator introduced Trump’s FBI nominee Kash Patel during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Tillis’ campaign has more than $2 million on hand, according to FEC disclosures.
GOP Hold: Republican Ohio Sen. Jon Husted
The NRSC will also have to defend newly-sworn in Republican Ohio Sen. Jon Husted during a special election set for November 2026.
Husted has to run in a special election during the 2026 midterms in order to serve out the remainder of Vice President JD Vance’s senate term. Husted must also seek reelection in 2028 to seek another term in the Senate.
Though Trump trounced Harris in Ohio last November by more than 11 percentage points, Republican Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno’s victory over former Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown was decided by just 200,000 votes.
Brown has not ruled out challenging Husted or running in Ohio’s gubernatorial contest set for 2026.
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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.