POLITICAL STORM — In a month marked by a proliferation of October Surprises — the imminent prospect of a Middle East war; a massive, now-settled port strike; the release of damning new details in a court case against Donald Trump — Hurricane Helene is beginning to look like the one that upstages them all. The precise location of some of the worst damage — Georgia and North Carolina — and the election-eve timing of the natural disaster means nearly every aspect of the recovery and response period will be refracted through a political lens. In fact, it’s already reshaping the presidential race in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, ranging from campaign messaging to turnout efforts to election administration. Both presidential campaigns understand the urgency and imperatives of election-year storm politics. In 1992, when Hurricane Andrew pounded Florida in the homestretch of the presidential election, FEMA’s disorganized and chaotic relief efforts proved costly to then-President George H.W. Bush: He went from winning Florida by a 22-point landslide in 1988 to a narrow, 2-point victory four years later in the aftermath of Andrew. His son, President George W. Bush, learned an important lesson from that shambolic episode. Beginning in August 2004, Florida was pummeled by four successive hurricanes that leveled broad swaths of the then-key swing state. Less than two days after Hurricane Charley first made landfall, Bush was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods, one of a handful of visits he made that fall to review storm-related damage. With FEMA’s performance winning plaudits, Bush won the state that year by 381,000 votes — a dramatic improvement over 2000, when he won Florida by just 537 votes. Without Florida’s 27 electoral votes that year, Bush would have lost reelection. (Whatever credit he got in Florida in 2004 was squandered the next year by the administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina; his presidency never recovered). As recently as 2012, yet another hurricane upended the election — Hurricane Sandy, which ripped through the Eastern Seaboard roughly a week before Election Day. There’s been much speculation that Sandy played a role in getting President Barack Obama reelected, either by bolstering perceptions of his leadership or by halting Mitt Romney’s late momentum. While the evidence supporting that notion is thin, it certainly didn’t hurt Obama’s cause. Exit polling found that 15 percent of voters said hurricane response was the most important factor in their vote, and of that group the majority voted for Obama. Now, the politics of federal disaster relief are once again front and center in the closing weeks of a presidential campaign. It’s a topic that Trump has always been keenly attuned to. The dramatic theater of the moment, the optics of projecting leadership and the opportunity to reward allies and hector enemies have made it an aspect of governance that seems to animate him. That’s already obvious in the aftermath of Helene, where he initiated the ongoing war to define the narrative surrounding the storm before it could take shape. He beat President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to the scene, visiting hard-hit Valdosta, Georgia, days before they did. He flooded the zone with lies and unsubstantiated claims. He asserted that Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp had been unable to reach Biden during the state’s hour of need. (Kemp later confirmed that he had already been in contact with Biden). He claimed to be receiving reports that the federal government and North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” (Republican governors in several of those states said otherwise). Trump also wrote on X that Biden and Harris “sacrificed Americans to an Open Border, and now, they have left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South.” Other Republicans have picked up on Trump’s cues and amplified his message. The Biden administration has been on the defensive ever since, forced to prove a negative by publicizing FEMA’s extensive efforts, correcting the record about Biden’s communications with governors and rolling out various Cabinet members to underscore the breadth of the government’s response. Biden, who doesn’t adhere to a rigorous travel schedule, suddenly traveled to four states in two days to inspect the damage. Harris cut short a campaign trip to Nevada to return home for an event at FEMA headquarters, followed by a visit to Georgia Wednesday. The messaging battle isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. After Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina are the biggest electoral prizes on the swing state map — at the moment, Trump leads both by a single percentage point, according to polling averages. In those two states, voter perceptions about presidential leadership in a moment of crisis and profound loss, and the federal government’s responsiveness in a time of great need, could have a material effect on the outcome. In a race this close, even the smallest atmospheric changes in either state’s political climate could be the difference between victory and defeat — Georgia, for example, was decided by less than 12,000 votes in 2020. And in both North Carolina and Georgia, the number of residents whose lives have been disrupted by the storms is significant. In western North Carolina, where the scope of the devastation and the loss of life has been astonishing, close to one million votes were cast in 2020 in the 25 counties designated for FEMA assistance. In Georgia, close to 650,000 votes were cast in the more than 40 FEMA-designated counties there. In both states, it’s mostly — though not exclusively — Trump country, covering many of the kinds of landslide rural counties he counts on in state after state to offset his metropolitan losses. But there are hurricane-affected areas that Democrats rely on as well. Asheville’s Buncombe County provides modest, but important Democratic margins in North Carolina. Likewise, in Georgia, the Democratic margins provided by Savannah’s Chatham County and Augusta’s Richmond County are an important counterweight to the sea of red votes cast in South Georgia. How the storm — and the government’s response — affects voting habits and turnout is just one part of the post-Helene equation. In the hardest hit counties of North Carolina where the recovery will be measured in years, not weeks and months, there are other basic questions about polling places, election infrastructure and mail service that need to be resolved over the next month. It’s too early to tell what Helene’s ultimate political impact will be. Even the upcoming polling results will be questionable in North Carolina now that an important region of the state has been decimated. What’s more certain is that these southeastern swing states will be decided by minuscule margins — and how each campaign handles the events of the next few weeks could easily swing the result. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmahtesian@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie.
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