Voters displaced. Polling stations destroyed. Will hurricanes depress voter turnout?

NEWLAND, N.C. — 

All day, the phone rang inside the tiny Avery County elections office. Voters from all over this disaster-ravaged corner of Appalachia had the same question: How, after the storm, could they vote?

The director of the board of elections, Sheila Ollis, picked up the phone cheerily, even though Hurricane Helene wiped out 14 out of 19 polling stations and upended much of her careful planning. Thousands of residents are displaced after muddy brown water flooded their homes or cut them off from the outside world by wiping out roads or totaling their cars.

But Ollis said she did not think the catastrophic flood damage and mud slides would dampen turnout in this strongly GOP county where more than three-quarters of voters backed Trump in 2020.

“We’ve got a plan and we’re working together,” Ollis said. “We are just mountain strong. People take voting seriously, because we are mostly Republicans up here.”

Three weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated huge swaths of North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, even a slight drop in turnout at polling stations in pivotal Southern swing states could determine which party controls the White House and Congress. Polling averages compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com show Trump ahead of Harris by just 0.9 of a percentage point in North Carolina and 2.1 percentage points in Georgia, within the margin of error. In Florida, which was hit first by Helene and then Milton, Trump has a more comfortable lead of 5.3 percentage points.

In North Carolina, 1.3 million registered voters live in the 25 counties designated FEMA disaster areas — about 17% of the state’s registered voters — and more of them are Republicans. About 38% of the voters of the devastated area of western North Carolina are registered as Republicans, 23% are Democrats and 38% are unaffiliated, according to Michael Bitzer, professor of politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C.

But a drop in Republican turnout is not inevitable. Last week, North Carolina’s bipartisan State Board of Elections approved emergency measures to help hurricane victims vote in 13 counties where infrastructure, accessibility to voting sites, and postal services remain disrupted.

Trump 2024 campaign signs dot front yards, even if they are dwarfed by piles of sodden mattresses, sofas and cabinets. And many rural voters here — who have spent the last few weeks patching up roads and driveways, cutting up fallen trees and hauling plates of hot food to their neighbors — pride themselves on their resilience and can-do spirit.

“This is the mountains,” said Jeff Vance, a 60-year-old truck driver, as he hauled cans of corn and beef one day this week from a relief hub to his pickup truck. “If Trump’s in, I’m voting.”

Vance said his home had survived with just a flooded basement, but he was taking care of his parents with dementia after the storm washed away their driveway and knocked out power, forcing them to rely on a generator. He probably wouldn’t vote until Nov. 5 as he planned to drive to Alabama for work, but if he heard of anyone who couldn’t make it out their driveway he would crank up his ATV and give them a ride to the polls.

“If someone needs to vote, I will drive them,” he said. “I want this country back to how it was.”

In a bid to make voting more accessible, Avery County added a second early voting location to make it easier for residents in particularly hard-hit communities.

But identifying new polling locations for election day was a challenge. Helene washed away polling sites up and down the North Toe River — including part of the cinder block foundation of the Green Valley Volunteer Fire Department and the brick walls of the Roaring Creek Freewill Baptist Church. Many churches and businesses that survived are now filled with cots or piled high with food and emergency supplies. But Ollis plans to have 11 polling stations open on Nov. 5.

“Everybody still wants to vote,” Ollis said. “They want to see changes made. And if they can’t vote, we can possibly even have… teams go out to them with ballots and bring the ballot back in sealed envelopes.”

But even as the vast majority of early voting sites in the state’s hardest-hit areas are up and running — the state had record turnout on the first day of early voting, with 353,166 people casting ballots — the question is whether voters will keep showing up. Nearly 100 people remain missing after the storm killed 125 people across the state and more than 500 roads remain blocked.

“Do voters have their house? Are they able to go to work? Can their kids go to school?” Bitzer said. “If those basic necessities aren’t available to them, where does voting and participating in the election fall on their priorities? I think it will be fairly low compared to everything else.”

Many Republicans here were incensed earlier this month when Democratic analyst David Axelrod, who served as a senior advisor to former President Obama, suggested on his podcast that “upscale” liberal voters in Asheville would be more adept at navigating voting hurdles than rural Republicans.

“I’m not sure a bunch of these folks who’ve had their homes and lives destroyed elsewhere in western North Carolina, in the mountains there, are going to be as easy to wrangle for the Trump campaign,” Axelrod said.

Michele Woodhouse, the GOP chair of North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, was quick to defend rural Republicans.

“I assure you the God fearing, gun totting, MAGA mountain deplorables will crawl over Hurricane debris, down mountain sides, across roads that no longer exist to VOTE FOR TRUMP!!” Woodhouse posted on X.

Woodhouse said Republicans across western North Carolina were even more motivated to vote after the storm, incensed by what they perceived as a slow federal response. She repeated the false claims that FEMA — which has approved more than $100 million so far in individual assistance for North Carolina households — was giving only $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery.

“If the federal government can release $157 million [in humanitarian aid] to Lebanon,” she said, “they can release $157 million to the people of western North Carolina who are sitting with no water, no power.”

Last week, Woodhouse said, two men walked into her county GOP office and told her they were so disheartened by the FEMA response they had changed their affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Volunteers had also flooded her office offering to do whatever it takes — pitching in with all-terrain vehicles or money for radio campaign ads — to help people get to the polls.

“Neighbors are helping neighbors to make sure people can get out and vote, because they know how important this election is,” she said. “The enthusiasm to help get them to polls is at an unbelievable level.”

Yet not everyone was thinking about the election.

Morgan Byrd, a 25-year-old stay-at-home mom, said voting was the last thing on her mind as she picked up diapers and wipes for her baby from a food distribution hub.

Byrd’s home in the tiny town of Crossnore had roof damage, with water come through her ceiling, and she was waiting to hear if insurance would cover it. The storm had put her husband, who mows lawns, out of work, so he was hauling gravel with his dump truck. But she said nobody had money to pay him.

“I don’t mean to be ugly, but we’re trying to get back to normal,” she said. “We’re not thinking about voting.”

As residents focus on recovery, Helene halted almost all political campaigning across western North Carolina.

Erin Buchanan, chair of the Avery County Republican Party, played a leading role in county relief efforts, working with her husband to convert their Spear Country Store into a hub offering hot meals, WiFi, fresh milk, laundry services, hot showers, even free haircuts.

Her husband formed crews to pitch in to repair the county’s roads and drive side by side utility vehicles to conduct wellness checks on dozens of homes and carry food, generators and oxygen to families in need.

Frank Hughes, chair of the Avery County Democratic Party and a candidate for the North Carolina state Senate, was cut off without power or phone service at his home near Linville Falls for two weeks. He abandoned campaigning, not even mentioning he was running for office when he met a local judge as he volunteered with the First Baptist Church.

“It pretty much arrested my campaign,” Hughes said of the hurricane, noting that until Helene he had spent Saturdays and Sundays canvassing around the county with a dedicated crew of supporters.

The night before early voting started Thursday, Democrats were not in frenetic campaign mode when they met for their monthly meeting at Newland Town Hall. It was the first time they had seen each other since the storm. They hugged, they shared news of new polling stations and they tried to figure out their game plan for weeks before Nov. 5.

Hughes told them he planned to focus on volunteering at donation hubs on weekends instead of fanning out across the district to campaign like he did before the storm.

“Right now, it’s basically impossible to canvas door to door,” Branch Richter, the Avery County Democratic Party’s second vice chair, told the volunteers. “Until further notice, we’re moving all of our operations into virtual phone banking.”

But virtual phone banking required internet and not everyone was connected. After Helene, phone banking scripts would be tweaked.

“Make sure that they’re safe, that they’ve got resources they need,” Richter said. “There will be resources provided in the script, places we can direct them if they need things: pharmaceuticals, food, water, things like that. And then if they’re still willing to continue the conversation after that, we can talk to them about voting.”

Hughes stressed that they should remind people on their call list that if they wanted federal aid and recovery to continue, they should vote Democratic.

“Project 25 calls for gutting FEMA and National Weather Service,” Hughes said.

Rose Tatum, 45, a nonprofit worker who set up a local chapter of NC Women for Harris this summer, said her group had built lots of momentum until the storm, mailing out 2,500 postcards, making calls, knocking on doors, and placing sticky notes in women’s bathroom stalls.

But as Helene stalled political campaigning and the hurricane response turned into a political issue — with misinformation so widespread that FEMA published a fact sheet to debunk rumors and lies around disaster funding — Tatum worried the storm could hurt Democrats across western North Carolina.

“There’s so many rumors and misinformation floating around,” Tatum said. “People who were maybe on the fence are shifting.”

Some voters admitted Helene had slightly changed their views on the election.

After mudslides from the storm washed away roads that led 2½ miles up to her home atop Rebwin Mountain, Nichelle De Souza, a 32-year-old teacher of deaf students, had no power and could only get up and down from her home with her husband and four kids by cramming into a neighbor’s tiny ATV. On Wednesday, she set up a GoFundMe appealing for help.

An independent voter, De Souza said she voted for President Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. But she admitted the hurricane response was affecting her thinking on the election. Government aid had been too slow, she said, and her family had relied 100% on the community for help.

“I think everybody expected government aid quicker,” she said as she stopped by a food distribution hub this week to pick up diapers and winter clothes for her kid.

Nichelle found herself leaning toward voting for Trump. Even though Vitor, a Brazilian citizen who can’t vote, questioned whether the party in power determined the response on the ground.

“If the community wasn’t as responsive, what would it look like here?” she said. “The government took so long.”