With just over two weeks to go before the 2024 presidential election and the race in a dead heat, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are hitting the campaign trail in strategic battleground states.
Trump made three North Carolina stops Monday, including a visit to see storm damage in Asheville. Harris is out to win over suburban voters in key Midwestern battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and teaming up with Republican former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.
During one of several stops on Monday in North Carolina, Trump urged supporters in the hurricane-battered mountains to go to the polls despite the hardships they were facing.
With opinion polls showing a close race, the two candidates are picking up the pace, their frenzied campaign schedules underlining the importance of small pockets of voters that could put either candidate over the top.
Trump ended his day at an evangelical Christian event in Concord, North Carolina, telling a crowd he likes to think that during the failed assassination attempt against him on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, he was saved by being “knocked to the ground by a supernatural hand.”
He said as he looks back on his life, “I now recognize that it’s been the hand of God leading me to where I am today.”
Evangelical leader Franklin Graham offered a prayer that Trump be elected.
“Rallies and positive poll numbers are not going to win this election,” Graham said. “It’s going to be God.”
Trump’s visit to North Carolina coincided with concerns among his Republican allies that crippling damage from storm Helene will depress turnout in the battleground state’s conservative mountain regions.
The area hit hardest by Helene is deeply Republican. Trump won about 62 percent of the vote in 2020 in the 25 counties declared to be a disaster area after Helene, while Biden won about 51 percent in the remainder of the state, according to a Reuters analysis.
“Obviously, we want them to vote but we want them to live and survive and be happy and healthy, because this is really a tragedy,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Swannanoa, population 5,300, after touring areas destroyed by the storm.
At an event with Harris in Royal Oak, Michigan, Cheney sought to give Republicans who are on the fence permission to support the Democrat without worry of reprisal.
“I certainly have many Republicans who will say to me, ‘I can’t be public.’ They do worry about a whole range of things, including violence, but they’ll do the right thing,” Cheney said. “And I would just remind people, if you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody.”
Cheney and her father Dick Cheney, who was vice president under President George W. Bush, are two of the most prominent Republicans to have endorsed Harris.
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.
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.
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.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.