RUTHERFORDTON, N.C.—The presidential race in North Carolina is playing out in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are ramping up their activity here again after the storm. Trump has three North Carolina stops Monday, including a visit to see storm damage in Asheville. Former President Bill Clinton appeared last week with Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, and followed with several visits in eastern North Carolina.
With 15 days until Election Day, North Carolina is critical to the Electoral College math that will decide whether Trump gets a White House encore or Harris hands him a defeat.
“We are going to win or lose the presidency based on what happens in North Carolina,” Republican National Chairman Michael Whatley, a North Carolinian, said last week as part of a GOP bus tour.
Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes have gotten more attention from Harris and Trump than other battlegrounds. But North Carolina and Georgia are the next largest swing states, with 16 electoral votes each.
North Carolina is expected to cast as many as 5.5 million ballots, with more than 1 million votes already cast since the start of early voting last Thursday.
Harris on Monday was targeting suburban Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—holding a series of conversations with Republican Liz Cheney that will be moderated by Bulwark publisher and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.
Many North Carolina counties affected by Hurricane Helene moved Election Day precincts or changed early voting sites. Thousands of voters remained displaced or without power or water as early voting commenced.
Buncombe County, home to left-leaning Asheville, was hard-hit. The University of North Carolina Asheville campus remained closed as of Monday. Appalachian State University in Boone, the other cache of Democratic votes in the mountainous region, just resumed some in-person classes. But surrounding western counties, including Rutherford, add up to more GOP votes than Democrats’ advantages in Asheville and Boone. That leaves both parties scrambling to check turnout operations and their math.
“We’re working every channel we can, you know?” Whatley said. “We’re going to be doing phone calls. We’re going to be doing direct mail. We’ll be doing emails and digital—basically anything we can do to let people know where to go.”
Republicans like Kryo, who lives a short drive from the devastated Chimney Rock community, said she knows “plenty of Trump supporters who lost everything” and others who remain in their homes but don’t have reliable internet or phone connections and may not know their polling location.
“I’ll go door to door if I have to,” she said.
Yet Trump and Republicans never built the same campaign infrastructure as Harris—or President Joe Biden’s before he dropped out of the race in July.
“It was a flip of a coin before the storm,” said GOP pollster Paul Shumaker. “The critical question is going to be: How is the rural turnout going to compare matched with the urban and suburban turnout?”
State Sen. Natalie Murdock, who doubles as political director for Democrats’ coordinated campaign in the state, said the party has the apparatus to reach their target voters in the disaster zone. Field workers in some of Democrats’ two-dozen-plus offices around the state have engaged in recovery efforts, distributing water and other supplies to residents. Murdock noted that Appalachian State is slated to be fully operational before Election Day, with students being able to vote at their usual campus precinct. Democratic aides said UNC Asheville students are being contacted and encouraged to cast absentee ballots if they cannot vote in-person.
Even before Helene, North Carolina was all the more compelling because of its history of split-ticket voting. It’s one of the few states that features competitive governor’s races concurrent with presidential contests. Democrats have carried the presidential electoral votes just once since 1992 (Barack Obama’s narrow win in 2008). Republicans have won just one governor’s race in the same span. Four years ago, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper won reelection by 4.5 points despite Trump outpacing Biden. He’s now term-limited.