(The Epoch Times)—The blizzard blasting across Iowa Friday is expected to taper off early Saturday and be old news by the time voters convene in caucuses at 7 p.m. Monday to cast the first ballots in the 2024 election cycle.
The deep freeze trailing in the storm’s wake, with subzero temperatures forecast all day and nighttime wind chills plummeting to -30—as in minus-30—on Monday, will, however, be very much in the news as Iowa Republicans bundle up and head to 730 caucus sites statewide to pick their 2024 GOP presidential candidate.
Whether Monday’s frigid temps will dissuade voters from getting to caucus sites, often within an easy drive of their homes, is a question many have been wondering since the National Weather Service forecast it 10 days ago.
Some say yes. Some say no. But nobody knows no matter how many hours of talking head speculation fills air time between now and Monday night.
Lee Stofer, of Camanche in east Iowa’s Clinton County, who will be hosting a caucus in the barn behind his Lee Stofer Music shop, said if it was snowing Monday night, that could trim turnout.
But cold? No. It’s Iowa in January, he told The Epoch Times.
“Bring a coat,” he suggested. The barn isn’t heated, which is why he expects it to be over with “within an hour.”
“The bitter cold on Monday may keep some people away,” Waterloo precinct captain Kevin Briden told The Epoch Times. “But people in Iowa are hearty souls who take this caucus vote seriously. So people may be surprised as to how many show up.”
They won’t be surprised in Bremer County. During a meeting in the Readlyn Library on Thursday, Bremer County GOP Committee Chair John Pentecost told 23 precinct and caucus captains to expect as many as 1,800 Republican voters to show up at the county’s five caucus sites.
That would be 350 more than the record 1,445 who participated in the county’s 2016 Republican presidential caucuses.
“With the temperatures they are forecasting for Monday night, I don’t think we’ll have that high of a turnout,” Mr. Pentecost said.
The precinct and caucus leaders mostly disagreed, noting Mr. Pentecost moved from balmy Minnesota to the east-central Iowa county a few years ago, so what does he know about locals’ commitment to caucus?
It’s the Democrats caucusing in nearby Denver, Iowa, who need to worry, they said. “I’d like to watch them getting there because most of them walk around barefoot,” one laughed.
In Mills County’s Silver City, Gary and Susan McNutt are hosting their precinct’s caucus in their family room—one of the few, if not the only one, that will be in a private home. In 2000, nearly a third were.
More than 50 showed up in her family room for 2016’s caucus, said Ms. McNutt, co-chair of the Mills County Republican Committee. She expects at least that many on Monday, regardless of how cold it gets.
“We’ll have everything all shoveled and put out cookies and coffee,’ Ms. McNutt. “We’ll squeeze everybody in with their big coats.”
Campaigns Disrupted
The storm, which had dropped about 6 inches of snow by mid-day Friday in the Des Moines area, is expected to make travel hazardous through Saturday when winds up to 35-45 miles per hour create ground blizzards, glazing roads in slip-streams of feathery ice and snow funnels.
While the Friday storm may not affect Monday’s turnout, it disrupted Republican presidential candidates’ stump schedules, prompting cancellations of planned appearances by former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Republican front-runner former President Donald Trump did not have any scheduled campaign events Friday. Kari Lake, an Iowa native who is running for U.S. Senate in Arizona, canceled an appearance on his behalf.
Mr. Trump’s Saturday stump stops in Atlantic and Sioux City and Sunday in Indianola and Cherokee remain on his campaign site’s schedule.
The storm and subsequent deep freeze are no surprise. It’s been forecast for 10 days. Mr. Trump called on supporters during a Jan. 5 rally in Newton to brave the cold and get to their caucuses on Monday.
“You just have to put on that warm coat and get out there,” he said.
Ms. Haley’s campaign canceled three campaign events in Fort Dodge, Le Mars, and Council Bluffs and is instead staging “telephone town halls.”
“Stormy weather won’t stop us from ensuring Iowans hear Nikki’s vision for a strong and proud America,” Haley campaign spokesman Pat Garrett said in a statement. “With only three days until the caucuses, we’re going to keep telling voters why they should Pick Nikki.”
Mr. Ramaswamy was sallying forth in his campaign, conducting a “Live from an Iowa Blizzard Tele-Townhall“ in his SUV between campaign stops.
“Ran into Steven walking into our 2nd event today, but he couldn’t join us because he is working today as a postal service worker delivering the mail,” he said in a mid-afternoon X post about meeting a mailman making his rounds. “If he’s working in the middle of the snowstorm, so am I.”
During a Free Soil rally on Wednesday protesting the proposed Summit CO2 pipeline, Mr. Ramaswamy said his supporters won’t be dissuaded by the cold.
“Human beings come out a little bit less when they’re cold,” he said. “I think this is going work to our advantage. Many of my supporters are not tepid supporters.”
Enthusiasm Tested
Mr. DeSantis attended his first event Friday, but his Never Back Down PAC canceled the rest of his slate for the day. He did, however, make an unscheduled stop at his campaign’s Iowa headquarters in Urbandale to thank volunteers.
“What it does for the overall turnout, I mean, nobody can forecast what the turnout is gonna be,” he said. “Anyone that tells you they can do that is not it’s not being honest. It’s a major wildcard.”
It’s a “wildcard” he, like Mr. Ramaswamy, believes could benefit his campaign.
“I know it’s going to be cold. I know it is not going to be pleasant,” Mr. DeSantis told campaign workers. “We don’t know what the turnout is going to be like. It could be much smaller than the 2016 cycle. That’s possible.”
So, he told his volunteers, “Bring four, five friends. That could make a big difference” if the turnout is lower than expected.
FAMiLY Leader founder, influential conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, told CNN in an early afternoon interview that the Florida governor’s ground game is “the best I’ve ever seen” and will be “the difference-maker” on Monday.
Conservative WHO (AM) Des Moines radio host Jeff Angelo, in a later CNN interview, said he doesn’t “think we are going to have a record turnout. People have heard all the news reporting and the hype and maybe they were going to come out but, nothing like minus-30 degrees to encourage you to stay in your kitchen and have a little chili that night.”
It will be the “diehards” who show up, he said, and no one in the race has more “diehards” than Mr. Trump.
“Trump supporters will absolutely walk through snow” to cast their ballot, Mr. Angelo said, noting the “less enthusiastic” voters the other campaigns, especially Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis, are relying on could be no-shows for Monday.
The deep freeze is going to give others “more trouble” than it will for Mr. Trump, with the lower turnout favoring the former president. “The more the temperatures drop,” he said, “the higher the probability that Trump wins.”
That’s pretty much what a campaign staffer told Mr. Trump last week, he told supporters during his Newton rally.
“My people will walk on glass—they don’t care … right?” He said. “We love bad weather because the weather’s not going to keep our people away. The worse, the better. We won’t lose one vote.”
Janice Hisle contributed to this report
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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.