Chris Carlson/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris receives a briefing from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on the damage from Hurricane Helene, October 5, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
One thing you can count on in presidential elections is October surprises. This election is no exception—the Middle East on the brink of wider war, Elon Musk going all in to elect Trump—but having twin hurricanes disrupt voting was not on anyone’s radar.
The damage from Hurricanes Helene and Milton will make it harder to cast ballots, notably in North Carolina and to a lesser extent in Georgia and Florida. People displaced from their homes, or who have lost loved ones, have more urgent things on their minds than voting. For those who have already requested mail-in ballots, many are not at their usual addresses. With so many roads impassable, mail delivery has been suspended in several areas, and some post offices remain closed.
In the 25 counties in western North Carolina that were designated as disaster areas after being ravaged by Helene, voters in 2020 supported Trump by a wide margin, helping him to carry the state by just 1.3 points. On the other hand, the largest and hardest-hit city in the area is deep-blue Asheville.
You might think that North Carolina Republicans would appreciate that making it easier for voters in the western part of the state to cast ballots would help their cause. But Republican legislators are sticking to their playbook of trying to depress voting generally because they care more about reducing turnout in Democratic strongholds.
While the bipartisan state Board of Elections passed a resolution to allow voters in 13 heavily affected counties to turn in absentee ballots as late as 7:30 p.m. on Election Day and expand opportunities to pick up ballots until the day before the election, they did not act to extend the deadline to register to vote, which is today, October 11. On Wednesday, a Democratic state representative, Caleb Rudow from Buncombe County (Asheville), filed a bill to extend the registration deadline until October 16 for hurricane victims. Every Republican voted against it.
A further complication is the right-wing campaign to smear FEMA. All over social media, there are outlandish inventions, repeated by Trump. FEMA ran out of money because its budget was overspent on immigrants. FEMA discriminated against Republican areas.
In fact, FEMA went all out to provide relief, and Biden was in regular touch with all of the region’s governors to ask what they needed. Even Republican governors felt compelled to challenge these stories, demonstrating the disarray in Republican ranks and reflecting well on Biden-Harris. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp told reporters, “[Biden] just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, we got what we need. We will work through the federal process.”
Yet some polls have shown that FEMA is not well trusted. A recent YouGov poll showed that 55 percent of respondents approved of their governor’s response to the hurricane disaster but only 43 percent approved of FEMA’s.
Biden has called out Trump’s lies, and Democrats at all levels need to keep shaming Republicans who want to make it harder to vote in the aftermath of a disaster. In principle, hurricanes of increasing ferocity give Democrats the obvious talking point that Republicans are the party of climate denial. But that only works to a point, when the immediate problem is an urgent human catastrophe.
A literal county-by-county calculus may suggest that depressed voting in North Carolina will hurt Republicans slightly more than Democrats. But for the most part, disasters are not good for incumbents because they suggest that things are out of control. No matter how well FEMA responds, it’s not enough.
If we can get through the next three weeks with no more disasters, natural or man-made, that’s better for Kamala Harris—and maybe we can avoid the ultimate disaster of a Trump victory.
