California’s 2026 governor’s race has become one of the strangest political spectacles in recent memory — and that is saying something for a state that has perfected the art of political dysfunction. Within the span of a single week, the race was reshaped by a presidential endorsement and then blown open further by a scandal that would have seemed unthinkable even by Sacramento’s elastic standards of acceptable behavior. For Republicans, the moment carries genuine strategic weight. For Democrats, it is yet another reminder that their party’s internal disorder is not merely an inconvenience — it is a structural crisis.
Listen to “How Swalwell’s Obliteration Changes the Dynamic in the Gubernatorial Race” on Spreaker.
When President Trump issued his complete and total endorsement of Steve Hilton on April 6, posting on Truth Social that
“Gavin Newscum and the Democrats have done an absolutely horrendous job. People are fleeing, crime is increasing, and Taxes are the highest of any State in the Country, maybe the World. Steve can turn it around, before it is too late, and, as President, I will help him to do so!”
the political class treated it as a moderately interesting development in an otherwise sleepy race. Then came the Swalwell bombshell, and suddenly that endorsement looks far more consequential than anyone initially appreciated.
- President Trump issued his complete and total endorsement of Republican Steve Hilton for California governor on April 6, consolidating conservative support ahead of the June 2 primary.
- The San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published allegations by multiple women accusing Rep. Eric Swalwell of sexual misconduct, including rape allegations from a former staffer who worked for him from 2019 to 2021.
- Within hours of the story breaking, Swalwell lost his campaign co-chair, key Democratic endorsers including Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and Hakeem Jeffries, and the backing of major California unions including SEIU and the California Teachers Association.
- Swalwell denied the allegations as “absolutely false” and had not withdrawn from the race as of this writing, though his political viability has collapsed.
- The Manhattan District Attorney’s office confirmed it is investigating the allegations.
- Prior to the scandal, Hilton and fellow Republican Chad Bianco were already polling in the top two spots in some surveys, tied at 14%, with the Democratic vote fragmented across more than a dozen candidates.
- Trump’s endorsement is expected to grow Hilton’s support while potentially drawing it away from Bianco, reducing — but not eliminating — the possibility of two Republicans advancing to the November general election.
- With Swalwell’s collapse, the Democratic vote becomes even more atomized, with Katie Porter and Tom Steyer considered the most likely beneficiaries of his exit.
- Rep. Anna Paulina Luna filed a motion to expel Swalwell from Congress, a move several Democrats indicated they could support.
Hilton, a British-born former strategist for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party who became a U.S. citizen in 2021, is running on an unabashedly practical platform — $3 gas, electric bills cut in half, the first $100,000 of income tax-free, and affordable housing. He describes it as putting “common sense ahead of ideology.” It is a message calibrated for a California electorate that is exhausted by fifteen years of progressive governance that has produced the nation’s highest poverty rate, rampant homelessness, and some of the most punishing cost-of-living pressures in the developed world. The Trump endorsement injects that campaign with rocket fuel — name recognition, fundraising momentum, and the consolidation of Republican voters who might otherwise have split their support with Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.
The Swalwell Collapse and What It Means
Eric Swalwell’s trajectory in this race had always been built on one thing — his national profile as the most aggressive anti-Trump voice in the Democratic field. The San Francisco Chronicle’s reporting ended that in a single news cycle. The allegations — that Swalwell sexually assaulted a former staffer twice, sent explicit messages to multiple women, and then publicly attacked the accusers as participants in a conspiracy — followed a now-familiar Democratic playbook for managing these moments: deny, accuse the accusers, buy time. What he did not count on was that his own party would refuse to play along.
The exodus was swift and stunning. His campaign co-chair, Rep. Jimmy Gomez, resigned immediately. Sens. Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego withdrew their endorsements. Nancy Pelosi, never one to expend political capital on a losing cause, made clear he should go. Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement calling for a “swift investigation” and an immediate exit from the race. The SEIU formally rescinded its endorsement. The California Teachers Association suspended support. The political action committee backing him suspended its operations. Even fellow Democratic candidate Tom Steyer dropped the velvet glove:
“Eric Swalwell should be nowhere near any position of power, much less be the governor of California.”
It is worth pausing to appreciate the irony here. Swalwell spent years as one of Washington’s most self-righteous voices on gender politics, weaponizing #MeToo rhetoric against his political opponents with practiced ease. The same man who sat in impeachment hearings lecturing the nation about the importance of accountability now finds himself begging for the benefit of the doubt from an increasingly impatient party that has none to give. As Steve Hilton put it pointedly, it is “incredible that the big unions that run California picked Swalwell as their puppet, knowing full well that all this was out there.”
The GOP’s Strategic Opening
California’s jungle primary system means the top two vote-getters in June advance to November regardless of party. Going into this race, that structure presented both an opportunity and a trap for Republicans. The opportunity was real — a badly fragmented Democratic field running eight significant candidates could, mathematically, allow both Hilton and Bianco to claim the top two spots and lock Democrats out of the general election entirely. The trap was that the Trump endorsement, by dramatically boosting Hilton, would pull Republican votes away from Bianco and give Democratic strategists the breathing room to ensure at least one of their candidates advanced.
That calculus was already being stress-tested before the Swalwell story broke. Now, with the Democratic field further destabilized, the strategic picture shifts again — but not necessarily in the direction Republicans might hope. The most likely beneficiaries of Swalwell’s collapse are moderate Democrats like Katie Porter and Tom Steyer, who have the money and infrastructure to absorb his supporters. If one Democrat consolidates that vote quickly, they become formidable. But if the scramble drags on — and California Democratic politics rarely resolves itself cleanly — Hilton’s position only strengthens.
The deeper story here is what this race reveals about the state of California’s political culture. A state that has not elected a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 is now genuinely, seriously considering a British-born conservative commentator who is promising to govern like a management consultant rather than an ideologue. That is not a tribute to Republican organizational genius. It is a verdict on two decades of one-party rule that has turned the world’s fifth-largest economy into a cautionary tale about what happens when progressive theory meets the immovable laws of economics and human nature.
What a Hilton Victory Would Actually Mean
The political media, which tends to treat California as a lost cause for Republicans, is already framing a Hilton general election run as quixotic at best. They are not entirely wrong about the structural challenges. Trump’s deep unpopularity outside of California’s conservative base is real, and an endorsement that consolidates a primary win can become a liability in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a ratio of nearly two to one.
But those analyses tend to underweight the degree to which California voters have been quietly radicalizing — not leftward, but toward a kind of exhausted pragmatism. The ballot initiative results of recent cycles, the recall energy against Newsom even if it ultimately failed, the flight of businesses and middle-class families to Texas and Nevada — these are not the indicators of a locked electorate. They are the indicators of an electorate that is frustrated and waiting for a credible alternative.
Proverbs 29:2 captures the stakes plainly — “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” Californians have been mourning for a long time. Whether Steve Hilton is the answer to that grief remains to be seen. But for the first time in years, that question is at least being asked in earnest, and the Democratic Party’s own dysfunction — embodied most vividly this week in the ruin of Eric Swalwell’s campaign — is doing as much to open the door as anything Republicans have managed on their own.
The June 2 primary is still weeks away. Much will change. Swalwell may still be technically on the ballot when voters mark their choices, a ghost candidate absorbing votes that no longer serve any political purpose. The Democratic establishment will scramble to consolidate behind someone. Bianco will continue fighting for relevance against a Hilton campaign now fully empowered by the most powerful endorser in American politics. None of it is settled. But the race that looked, even a month ago, like a predictable march toward another Democratic general election victory now looks like something else entirely — and that, in California, is remarkable in itself.
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.