Jersey City residents turned out Tuesday for a runoff that felt like a reckoning. In the end, they delivered a stinging rebuke to Jim McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor whose scandal-forced exit two decades ago still casts a long shadow over his bid for local redemption. Instead, they chose James Solomon, the 41-year-old city councilman who ran on a platform of reining in unchecked development and easing the squeeze on working families.
The race wasn’t close. Solomon captured about 68 percent of the vote to McGreevey’s 31 percent, according to results from the Hudson County Clerk’s Office. That’s a landslide in a city where politics often simmers with backroom deals and family names carry weight. Solomon’s margin echoed the frustration bubbling up in neighborhoods from the Heights to the waterfront, where skyrocketing rents and property taxes have priced out longtime residents.
This isn’t just another local upset—it’s the second time in as many months that voters in a major East Coast city have swatted down a disgraced ex-governor’s grab for a second act. Just weeks earlier, across the Hudson in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, trounced Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral race. Cuomo, who stepped down as New York’s governor in 2021 amid a cascade of sexual harassment allegations, had hoped to pivot to City Hall as an independent after losing the Democratic primary. Mamdani took 51 percent to Cuomo’s 41 percent, with turnout hitting levels not seen since 1969, fueled largely by young voters fed up with the old guard.
McGreevey’s fall mirrors that script almost too neatly. Elected governor in 2001, he resigned three years later in a nationally televised confession: “I am a gay American,” he said, admitting to an extramarital affair with a male aide he’d appointed to a high-paying state job. The fallout was brutal—divorce, a messy custody battle, and years out of the spotlight. Since then, McGreevey has rebuilt a quieter life, serving as executive director of a nonprofit helping ex-offenders and veterans reintegrate. He cast himself in the campaign as a “champion of second chances.”
But Jersey City, New Jersey’s second-largest city with its mosaic of immigrant communities and booming skyline, wasn’t buying the narrative. McGreevey, now 68, moved to the city about a decade ago and jumped into the race early, courting endorsements from Hudson County Democrats like State Sen. Brian Stack and former Senate President Stephen Sweeney. He framed his run as a return to steady leadership, promising to tackle the affordability crisis without upending the growth that’s turned Jersey City into a commuter’s haven just minutes from Manhattan.
Solomon, by contrast, positioned himself as the antidote to that very machine. A Jersey City native who once worked in the offices of ex-Boston Mayor Tom Menino and current U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, he won his council seat in 2017 representing Ward E, the downtown district packed with luxury condos and tech startups. His pitch? Get tough on developers who’ve flooded the market with high-end units while affordable housing lags.
“We are going to get tough on developers and force them to build housing you can afford,” Solomon said during the campaign. He railed against property tax hikes—up 20 to 30 percent in some spots under outgoing Mayor Steven Fulop—and vowed to prioritize families over special interests.
The general election in November set the stage, with seven candidates scrambling in the nonpartisan field. Solomon edged out McGreevey with 29 percent to 25 percent, forcing the December rematch when no one cleared 50 percent. The other contenders, including Hudson County Commissioner Bill O’Dea and former school board president Mussab Ali, threw their support behind Solomon in the runoff, tipping the scales further.
Fulop, the three-term incumbent who’s decamping to lead a New York business group after his own failed run for governor, leaves behind a city transformed but strained. Jersey City’s population has swelled past 300,000, drawing waves of newcomers with its skyline of glass towers and PATH trains to Wall Street. Yet that boom has bred resentment: Median rents hover around $2,800 a month, and the average home price tops $600,000. Residents like Mike Liu, a local tech worker, griped about the pace. “Just in 2022 alone, our taxes shot up by, like, 20, 30 percent,” Liu told reporters.
Solomon’s win signals a shift in a place long ruled by bosses like the infamous Frank Hague, whose machine gripped the city for decades. Progressives here, emboldened by national figures like Sen. Andy Kim—who endorsed Solomon—see it as proof that voters crave fresh faces over recycled scandals. McGreevey’s backers, including some county heavyweights, watched their influence wane as the race exposed fault lines in the local Democrat Party. Even whispers of old-school ballot tricks, like the now-defunct “county line” that once funneled votes to party picks, couldn’t save him.
In his concession, McGreevey struck a gracious note. “I want to say, from my heart, I congratulate Councilman—now Mayor-elect—James Solomon,” he told supporters at a subdued watch party. Solomon, meanwhile, wasted no time. “Together, we’re going to build a more affordable Jersey City, where everyone has a chance to thrive and where the people are put first, not developers and special interests,” he declared to cheers. “My promise to Jersey City is simple: I will be a mayor for you.”
As Solomon prepares to take office in January, questions linger about how he’ll deliver. Jersey City’s $700 million budget demands balance—courting investment without selling out to the high-rises that define its horizon. With a council that’s seen its share of turnover, he’ll need allies to push through zoning reforms or tax relief. And in a state where Gov. Phil Murphy’s tenure ends next month—paving the way for incoming Gov. Mikie Sherrill—the ripple effects could reach Trenton.
For now, though, this feels like a voter verdict on accountability. Twice in quick succession, in Jersey City and New York, the public has drawn a line: Past missteps don’t earn automatic forgiveness, no matter the apologies or the nonprofit gigs that follow.
Like New York City across the way, Jersey City is poised for a rude awakening when Marxist policies fail the people.
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.