(DCNF)—Democratic Washington Rep. Adam Smith said Friday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that not all supporters of President Donald Trump are “racist, bigoted morons,” adding that his party needs to broaden its outreach and not “constantly” focus on “identity politics.”
For nearly a year since Trump won the 2024 election, Democrats have struggled to understand and regain voters, creating a split over which ideas the party should prioritize. When asked what “single message” Democrats need to rally behind to “take back some power” during the midterms, Smith discussed how the party should engage Trump supporters.
“We have to understand that all whatever 80 million, I think, is the number that voted for Trump, something like that. They’re not all racist, bigoted morons. They’re not,” Smith said. “And we need to stop treating them like that and say, ‘OK, you’ve got concerns. We’re going to address them.’ We’re not going to get them all. We don’t need to get them all.”
“But we need to reach out to people that broadens our coalition. We can’t keep preaching to the choir. Look, I represent a 70% Democratic district,” Smith added. “Whether I’m here or not, a Democrat is going to represent this district. And that’s great. But what are we going to do to reach the people in those places that we aren’t winning?”
With media pundits and polls warning Democrats in recent months about their struggling approval among voters, data from RealClear Polling shows an average favorability of 34.7% for the party. In March, however, Democrats hit a new low in CNN’s SSRS poll, reaching just a 29% favorability rating.
According to a New York Times report released Aug. 20, between the 2020 and 2024 elections, Democrats lost an estimated 2.1 million voters across 30 states, alongside Washington, D.C. In comparison, Republicans added 2.4 million registered voters and gained more new voters than Democrats between 2024 and 2025.
Prior to his comments on Trump supporters, Smith said Democrats need to focus on “what Trump is doing and how that is unacceptable,” accusing the president of being an “authoritarian” and “turning [the U.S.] into a monarchy.” While criticizing Trump, Smith acknowledged the Democratic Party also needs to understand why voters haven’t been “thrilled” with them.
“We have to change. We have to get better. We have to legitimately address immigration. We have to have secure borders, and we didn’t do as good a job on that as we should have,” Smith continued. “Focusing on identity politics constantly is not what the American people want. All right. We get that. We’re going to fix that.”
“We’re going to run our cities better, which, by the way, we’re starting to do. You look at some of the things that are happening in San Francisco and other places where we’re getting after, you know, crime and homelessness and drug abuse and actually governing better,” Smith added.
Notably, the issue of crime in major Democrat-led cities came under the media spotlight in August — after Trump first deployed the National Guard into Washington D.C. after a slew of crimes gained national attention.
While Democratic lawmakers and legacy media pundits claimed Trump was overreaching his powers, pointing to the city’s crime dropping 35% in 2024. Data from local police, however, leaves out certain crimes such as felonies and aggravated assaults, allowing crime rates to appear lower compared with 2020.
With crime significantly dropping in Washington, D.C., Trump has called for deploying the National Guard in major cities like Chicago to address crime issues. However, Democrats such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker have argued the National Guard isn’t necessary, highlighting videos of low-crime areas of Chicago appearing to show the city is safe.
Some Chicago residents have voiced opposition to the governor and Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson, saying Trump’s assistance would be welcomed in high-crime areas.
According to ABC7 Chicago, police data through Aug. 16 shows homicides in the city down 25% compared to 2023. Over the last 12 months, there have been 474 homicides, while the yearly average between 2021 and 2023 hit 722, the outlet reported.
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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.