A bombshell Emerson College poll has upended expectations in California’s 2026 gubernatorial race, placing two Republicans atop the field in the state’s jungle primary and exposing the deepening fractures within the Democratic Party.
The survey, conducted April 14-15 among likely voters, shows former Fox News host Steve Hilton leading with 17 percent, followed closely by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco at 14 percent. Billionaire activist Tom Steyer ties Bianco at 14 percent, while former Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Rep. Katie Porter each sit at 10 percent. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan trails at 5 percent, with 23 percent of voters still undecided.
This configuration matters because California’s top-two primary system advances the two highest vote-getters to the general election regardless of party. For the first time in decades, Republicans stand a realistic chance of locking Democrats out of the November ballot entirely, forcing a GOP-versus-GOP contest that would hand conservatives an opening in the nation’s most populous state.
The immediate catalyst for this shift arrived with the sudden collapse of Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign. Once a top-polling Democrat, Swalwell suspended his bid and resigned from Congress after multiple women accused him of sexual assault and misconduct, including a former staffer’s allegation of rape. Videos surfaced showing him in compromising situations with a porn star.
Swalwell has denied the claims, but the damage proved fatal. His exit scattered Democratic support, boosting Becerra by 15 points among Democrats alone while leaving the field divided three ways: Steyer at 20 percent, Becerra at 19 percent, and Porter at 15 percent among Democratic voters.
President Donald Trump’s full-throated endorsement of Hilton has added momentum. Trump praised Hilton as a man who has watched California descend into high taxes, rising crime, and mass exodus, pledging federal help to restore the state. That backing could consolidate Republican votes behind Hilton while the Democratic scramble continues, ironically turning a split GOP field into a strategic advantage against a fractured left.
California has not elected a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006 and has lacked a GOP statewide officeholder since 2011. Decades of one-party Democratic rule have produced the highest taxes in the nation, rampant homelessness, failing schools, and businesses and residents fleeing in record numbers.
The current poll reflects voter exhaustion with that record. Even in a state where Democrats hold a massive registration advantage, the sheer number of candidates—61 on the primary ballot—has splintered their coalition beyond repair.
Earlier surveys told a similar story of Republican strength before Swalwell’s departure. A SurveyUSA poll just days prior had Steyer leading narrowly, but the post-Swalwell Emerson numbers confirm the trend: Democratic disarray is handing Republicans their best shot in a generation.
The implications stretch beyond one election cycle. A Republican sweep into the general election would force Democrats to confront the consequences of their governance failures in the most public way possible. It would also test whether California’s voters, long conditioned to accept progressive orthodoxy, have reached a breaking point.
For too long, the Golden State has served as a cautionary tale of unchecked left-wing policies: sanctuary laws that shield criminals, energy mandates that drive up costs, and social experiments that prioritize ideology over public safety and prosperity.
Sheriff Bianco has made law-and-order a centerpiece of his message, directly challenging the state’s soft-on-crime approach. Hilton, drawing on his media background and policy critique, argues for a fundamental reset. Their combined strength in the poll signals that Californians are open to alternatives after years of decline.
The fragmentation also raises pointed questions about party leadership. Where was the vetting process that allowed a candidate like Swalwell to rise before scandal forced him out? Why has no unifying Democratic figure emerged to stem the bleeding? The left’s inability to close ranks in its own stronghold exposes a deeper institutional weakness—one that conservatives have long predicted would eventually surface when accountability finally arrived.
As the June primary approaches, this race offers a rare window into the limits of progressive dominance. California’s voters face a choice between continuing the policies that drove the state into crisis or seizing an unexpected opportunity for course correction. The Emerson poll does not guarantee victory for Republicans, but it does confirm that the old assumptions no longer hold.
In the end, no political machine lasts forever when its results betray its promises. California’s long experiment in one-party rule has produced measurable suffering for millions. Whether that suffering has grown acute enough to overcome partisan inertia remains the central question of 2026.
The developments in Sacramento and Washington illustrate a recurring pattern: when leaders prioritize personal ambition and ideological purity over competent governance, the public eventually notices. Here, the consequences have manifested in policy failure and now electoral vulnerability.
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. (Revelation 20:12)
Accountability, whether in this life or the next, remains inescapable. California’s voters now hold a momentary lever to demand it at the ballot box. The coming months will reveal whether they possess the will to pull it.
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.