(DCNF)—Most Americans think the country’s economic and political systems are rigged against them — at levels greater than in several decades, according to an NBC News poll released Thursday.
The new survey found that almost 6 in 10 voters presently feel the economic and political systems are weighted against people such as themselves, which ties a record high share over about 40 years of national polling from NBC News. Of those surveyed, 59% agreed with the statement that both systems are stacked against them, while 38% disagreed and 3% were unsure.
The share of voters who agreed with that premise tied a peak high in April 1992, a record set after NBC News first began polling this question in 1988, the outlet reported. The percentage of voters who currently agree that the U.S.’ economic and political systems are fixed against them was notably higher than the percentage who said the same when NBC asked the question in the aftermath of the Great Recession — which began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009 — the poll shows.
A minority of 47% of voters agreed with the notion that “economic and political systems are stacked against people like you” and 47% disagreed when NBC News polled Americans in May 2010.
“Government statistics say that the economy is doing alright, but millions of Americans are frustrated,” David Hebert, an economist with the American Institute for Economic Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. “When in doubt, we should believe the people. They know more about their local conditions than any Bureau in Washington D.C.”
“The frustration that people feel is very real,” Herbert added. “Unfortunately, both parties propose variations of the same cure: more subsidies and more industrial policy. But that’s just going to lead to more political favoritism, where the well-connected receive government largesse, which is exactly what the American people are frustrated by.”
Moreover, 84% of voters polled in 2026 say they agree with the statement that “the very rich and powerful are above the law when they do something wrong, they look out for each other, using their power and connections to get special treatment” compared to 14% who disagree and 2% who were not sure.
Meanwhile, among respondents who agree with that sentiment, two-thirds said that the feeling that rich and powerful people are above the law has worsened over the past five or 10 years, while 29% said it has remained the same and 4% say it has improved, according to the newly released poll.
“The American people, by and large, are not anti-capitalism,” Herbert told the DCNF. “They’re anti-cronyism, where well-connected people get bailouts, tax breaks, and regulatory carveout. These crush the small businesses that are just trying to get ahead and reward the bigger, wealthier firms.”
“When a large corporation needs an exemption, they use their rolodex of contacts in the White House to secure a meeting with top officials,” he continued. “But when a small business feels the same, they have to fill out an online form and hope that some junior staffer somewhere in the Administration passes it up the chain. There’s nothing fair about that. It’s favoritism and it’s exactly what this poll reveals that American people are frustrated by.”
Two-thirds of independents along with 73% of Democrats view economic and political systems as stacked against them, according to the poll. The total number of Democrats who agree with that statement has risen by 26 points since September 2022, NBC News reported.
The survey also shows 44% of Republicans now say the country’s political and economic systems are stacked against them, marking a decline of 21 points since September 2022.
Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt told NBC News the new polling suggests “historic levels of anger and disgust with our political and economic systems.”
“It is a series of warning signs for the establishment and leaders of the country that Americans are deeply dissatisfied and looking for change,” Horwitt, who conducted the survey along with GOP pollster Bill McIntruff of Public Opinion Strategies, explained.
Some recent polling has shown warning signs for the Republican Party ahead of the November midterms. A CBS News/YouGov poll conducted in late February found that just 37% of voters approved of President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy, while 63% disapproved.
Earlier this week, Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul cautioned that his fellow Republicans may grapple with a “disastrous election” in November if oil prices in the U.S. do not begin to fall, The Hill reported on Thursday.
Still, the White House claimed in a Feb. 24 fact sheet that Trump “has moved swiftly to restore affordability and rebuild the American Dream for hardworking Americans” during his second term.
NBC News’ poll surveyed 1,000 registered U.S. voters from Feb. 27-March 3 by a combination of telephone interviews and an online survey sent via text message. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
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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.
