Former President Donald Trump continues to dominate the crowded Republican primary field as he makes his third bid for the White House.- Polling analysts emphasized how “unprecedented” and “unique” this cycle is, considering a former president is heavily in the lead with two federal indictments under his belt, they told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
- “This GOP primary is truly unprecedented, because Trump is not technically an incumbent, but Republican voters seem to be treating him as at least a quasi-incumbent,” Kyle Kondik, nonpartisan polling analyst and managing editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told the DCNF.
Former President Donald Trump continues to dominate the early primary season in an unprecedented third bid for the White House, polling experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
This Republican primary cycle is like none other as the frontrunner is a former president, has a massive lead in the polls, his former vice president is running against him and Trump has two federal indictments under his belt. Polling analysts stressed to the DCNF the stark difference between this GOP primary season and previous cycles, arguing that it’s difficult to draw comparisons in modern history.
“This GOP primary is truly unprecedented, because Trump is not technically an incumbent, but Republican voters seem to be treating him as at least a quasi-incumbent,” Kyle Kondik, a nonpartisan polling analyst and managing editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told the DCNF. “This primary is similar to 2016 in the sense that the field is large, meaning that it’ll be hard for a non-Trump to consolidate the non-Trump supporters.”
Kondik also noted that the former president’s legal troubles pose another “unique” angle to the primary, which the analyst argued makes it difficult to draw similarities between this election and previous cycles. Trump’s two indictments could cause “fatigue” among the GOP, leading to a drop in the polls, but Kondik doesn’t see signs of his support currently lagging.
In late March, the former president was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for allegedly falsifying business records when paying back former attorney Michael Cohen for giving porn star actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Trump. In early June, Trump was indicted by a federal judge in Miami, Florida, for alleged violation of the Espionage Act, along with several other charges like obstruction and making false statements, related to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe into the alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Jon McHenry, a GOP polling analyst and vice president at North Star Opinion Research, also stressed how unprecedented this Republican primary is and argued Trump’s reshaping of the party, paired with his indictment by the Manhattan district attorney, have helped the former president dominate the polls.
“This really is a unique cycle, at least since we’ve used primaries and caucuses as the primary vehicle to nominate our presidential candidates. In that time, we haven’t had an incumbent president lose a reelection and run again, much less lead in the polls,” McHenry told the DCNF. “President Trump’s lead right now is in part a testament to the extent to which he reshaped the party from a conservative party to a populist party.”
McHenry acknowledged how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was polling well against the former president prior to the first indictment, and noted Trump’s spike in support ever since.
“With the New York charges in particular being seen as politically motivated and questionable legally — with a very different context than holding top secret documents in an unsecure location — the Republicans who might have been ready to move on to a fresh face have at least for now rallied back to the former president,” McHenry said.
Trump maintains a strong lead in key early primary state polls among a crowded field of Republican presidential contenders, according to FiveThirtyEight. The former president is currently ahead in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina by 23 points, 28 points, 30 points and 23 points, respectively.
The RealClearPolitics (RCP) average for the 2024 national Republican primary, based on polls conducted between June 10 and June 26, indicate Trump is leading the GOP field by over 30 points, with only one other candidate, DeSantis, consistently polling in the double digits at 20.9%. Former Vice President Mike Pence has a RCP average of 6.1% support.
The current polling data illustrates the stark differences between this cycle and the two previous crowded GOP primary fields, as there wasn’t as clear of a frontrunner in the summers preceding the election years.
In 2015, just ahead of the Republican primary debates’ kickoff, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was in the lead with only 19% support, according to a late June CNN/ORC International poll, compared to Trump’s current RCP average of 53%. Bush was leading a similarly crowded field of GOP candidates by 7 points, followed by then-candidate Trump, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul at 12%, 8%, 7% and 7%, respectively.
In 2011, a Republican primary survey from late June indicated that the top four contenders for the 2012 election held double digit support, with the eventual nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, inching out ahead of the crowded field by 6 points, followed by former New York City Mayor Rudi Giuliani, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with 13%, 13% and 11%, respectively, according to a McClatchy-Marist poll.
“Is there a comparable election? Nope. And that’s fine,” Nathan Klein, pollster for OnMessage Inc., told the DCNF. “The one thing Americans, and especially the GOP primary electorate, don’t want is to do things the way they have been done.”
2024 GOP Primary Polling Trends among likely voters by Echelon Insights (A/B)
January
Trump — 36% (+2)
DeSantis — 34%Feb.
Trump — 46% (+15)
DeSantis — 31%March
Trump — 49% (+23)
DeSantis — 26%May
Trump — 49% (+30)
DeSantis — 19%JUNE
Trump — 49% (+33)
DeSantis — 16% pic.twitter.com/Ve9hn4RWgs— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) July 4, 2023
John McLaughlin, CEO and partner of McLaughlin & Associates, a polling firm that works closely with the former president’s campaign, told the DCNF that Trump’s massive lead in the polls is attributable to President Joe Biden’s administration indicting the former president and argued it’s also “historic” that Trump is leading Biden in general election matchups.
The RCP average for a 2024 head-to-head rematch between Trump and Biden, based on polls conducted between June 8 and June 27, indicates the former president is leading by 0.6 points.
“Compared to Trump’s success — on the economy, on national security, on the border and other issues — Biden’s failures are glaring, and there’s really a lot of buyer’s remorse. President Trump is leading in the national popular vote, and Republicans have not seen that since 2004,” McLaughlin said. “This is historic in multiple ways, but I think the epitome of it is that Joe Biden has indicted his political opponent, his leading political opponent — that’s never happened in American history. That’s what happens in communist countries.”
“President Trump continues to dominate in poll after poll — both nationally and statewide,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told the DCNF. “He is the only person who is beating Joe Biden by significant margins because voters know President Trump’s return to the White House means a strong economy, a secure border, and a safer America.”
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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.