(DCNF)—Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett filed to run for U.S. Senate on Monday, shaking up the crowded race to unseat Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn.
Crockett, a left-wing firebrand who is one of President Donald Trump’s loudest critics in Congress, is expected to announce her candidacy in an event touted as a “special announcement” later on Monday. Crockett’s entry into the race comes after several months of teasing a Senate run during which she repeatedly stated she would launch a bid if polling showed a path to victory.
Crockett’s paperwork filing was immediately preceded by Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred suspending his campaign on Monday morning. Crockett and Allred are both black Dallas-based Democrats who would have likely competed for the same minority coalition of voters to capture the party’s nomination.
Allred’s exit to run for a Dallas-area House seat will give Crockett an easier path to the nomination, though she will still have to overcome a primary challenge from Texas state legislator James Talarico, who is widely regarded as a Democratic rising star.
Crockett called Talarico and Allred to discuss internal polling last week, the Dallas Morning News first reported.
“The numbers say what I’ve said publicly: they say I can win,” Crockett told the outlet.
Crockett has not publicly released her internal polling nor shared it with any news outlet.
Crockett’s entry into the primary contest could increase the likelihood the March 3 primary advances to a run-off election. In Texas elections for federal office, the top vote-getter must notch at least 50% of the vote to avoid a run-off.
The three-way Republican primary race between Cornyn, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt is also likely heading to a run-off election slated for May.
Crockett, 44, appears to be betting that her combative personality will translate to strong fundraising numbers and backing from an energized base, who are urging elected Democrats to show more fight against Trump’s policy agenda.
Crockett has regularly sparked controversy in her two terms serving her Dallas-based district in the House of Representatives, which Republicans are likely to spotlight in attack ads.
The Texas Democrat has refused to retract her false claim that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, who previously served in the House, received a campaign contribution from deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I have no amendments,” Crockett told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins before repeating her defense that she did not have enough time to verify which Epstein made the contributions.
“I had maybe 20 minutes. We researched the FEC [Federal Election Commission] and, because I like to speak with specificity — that’s kind of what comes with being an attorney — I made clear that there was a Jeffrey Epstein,” Crockett said.
Crockett also referred to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbot as “Governor Hot Wheels” during a March speech in Los Angeles. Abbot has used a wheelchair since an accident in 1984 left him partially paralyzed.
The left-wing firebrand also characterized Trump supporters as mentally ill in June.
Crockett has trounced her Democratic primary competition in polling for months despite having no experience running statewide.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reported exclusively on the first survey of a hypothetical primary field showing Crockett would lead the competition if she entered the race.
The July survey, conducted by Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, went viral on social media with many national Republicans urging Crockett to run. Though Crockett is likely to perform well in a Democratic primary, she could struggle appealing to moderate Democrats and independent voters in a general election.
Crockett was drawn out of her current House seat during Texas’ Republican-led mid-decade redistricting, which the Supreme Court on Thursday allowed to stand for the midterms. Texas’ new GOP-friendly House map decreased the amount of heavily Democratic seats in the Dallas-Fort Worth area from three to two.
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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.