A long line of people stood outside the library in Asheville, North Carolina, Thursday morning for the start of early voting, surprising Republicans and Democrats alike.
The unexpectedly high turnout across Buncombe County, a Democratic stronghold in western North Carolina that was devastated by Hurricane Helene, cheered the candidates and organizers monitoring the polling places.
But political observers and campaigns alike cautioned that it remains impossible to predict how the storm will affect turnout through Election Day or if either the presidential campaign or the political party will fare worse because of it.
Much of the Democratic-leaning areas around Asheville has been destroyed by the flooding and mudslides from Hurricane Helene. Political groups suspended campaigning and get-out-the-vote efforts in this crucial swing state for the first weeks after the storm. Many were surprised by the enthusiasm.
“There was a line coming out the door, and I’ve never seen that before during early voting,” said Eric Ager, a state house Democratic representative for part of Buncombe County.
Turnout totals across the state on the first day of early voting just surpassed the record number from the first day of early voting in 2020, according to data from the State Board of Elections. Slightly more registered Democrats voted than Republicans and unaffiliated voters, but the electorate was almost split into even thirds.
“My mindset is that this is actually incentivizing people all the more to get out and vote,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the president of the state’s board of elections, at a press conference in Asheville Thursday about the effects of the storm.
Campaigning and canvassing have now resumed across much of the state, though with some different messages.
“There’s a lot of frankly fairly traditional direct voter contact activity going on right now, phone banking, canvassing. Now the messages, the scripts might change, but I think you’ll see fairly traditional activity,” Jonah Garson, the vice chair of the state Democratic Party, said.
Kathie Kline, the chair of Buncombe County’s Democratic Party, said that party volunteers had resumed canvassing in the neighborhoods less affected by the storm but were keeping away from the areas still battling the devastation. The local volunteers are also not making phone calls because it’s impossible to determine by phone what a person might be experiencing in the storm’s aftermath, Kline said.
But not everything is back to normal. The League of Women Voters, which usually schedules a robust set of get-out-the-vote events without endorsing any party, is in a “quandary” about what to do.
“It is a very awkward time,” Suzanne Fisher, the president of the organization’s Asheville section, said.
The group’s board met last night, and Fisher herself had to join the meeting from a laptop in a nearby McDonald’s parking lot. Many of their events for the coming weeks remain canceled.
Garson acknowledged that he is worried about turnout (and would be even without the storm), not just in the traditionally liberal Asheville but also in the more politically conservative rural areas surrounding it. Over the last couple of years, the state Democratic Party invested in building party infrastructure in those conservative counties, hoping to turn out the vote there too. “We don’t write anyone off,” he said, noting concern about voter access in the more remote areas.
Republican Party members on both the local and state level did not respond to requests for comment, but the state Republican Party signaled its own concerns about the storm’s impact by pushing for increasingly expansive voter access, a shift from Republican messaging that usually opposes such measures.
A Quinnipiac poll published yesterday found Harris leading within the margin of error in North Carolina, but how the storm affected the polling remains unclear.
Pollsters at Quinnipiac told NOTUS Thursday that they were worried about reaching people in that part of the state.
“We did the best we could to get an accurate representation of voters’ feelings about the races in the midst of the terrible tragedy in North Carolina,” Tim Malloy, a Quinnipiac polling analyst, said.
Chris Cooper, the director of public policy at Western Carolina University, cautioned that any predictions about how the storm will affect the races in North Carolina are probably impossible to trust. While the 13 counties that have been most affected by the storm leaned more in favor of Trump in 2020, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Harris campaign will benefit if some voters lose enthusiasm, interest or access, he said.
“Parts of the region are terrible, and parts of the region are probably going to be somewhat unaffected, and so it makes it harder to understand some of the likely effects,” Cooper said. “In one county, you could have a neighborhood that’s destroyed and a neighborhood that’s fine, and they could be five minutes away.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.