The devastation caused by Hurricane Helene is throwing a wrench in planned campaigning for both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Helene’s confirmed death count rose to 100 on Monday, with more than 2 million people still without power across the critical 2024 battlegrounds of Georgia and North Carolina, in addition to large sections of Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Trump, who campaigned in Pennsylvania on Sunday, canceled his Monday plans to survey storm damage and distribute relief in Valdosta, Georgia.
Over the weekend, the former president criticized Harris for attending fundraisers on the West Coast, where she pulled in an estimated $55 million, while the storm savaged the Southeast. However, Trump largely avoided criticizing his opponent while in Georgia.
“We’re not talking politics now,” Trump told reporters Monday afternoon. “We do need some help from the federal government.”
The Biden administration maintains that both the president and vice president will visit the Southeast but only when the logistics of planning a presidential trip don’t affect search and rescue and other emergency operations.
Both President Joe Biden and Harris were in Washington, D.C., on Monday to help coordinate the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response.
Harris, after returning from the West Coast, spoke with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Mayor Knox White of Greenville, South Carolina, and Mayor Van Johnson of Savannah, Georgia, and attempted to reach Mayor Jane Castor of Tampa, Florida, before attending an operational briefing at FEMA headquarters.
The vice president thanked the gathered FEMA officials for their work in the immediate aftermath of the storm but declined to answer questions from reporters and visibly frowned when asked if the cleanup effort was being politicized, according to the traveling press pool.
Biden, on the other hand, delivered remarks at the White House on two separate occasions Monday, first during a televised speech from the Roosevelt Room on Monday morning and second during an update from the Oval Office in the evening.
“It’s going to take a hell of a long time,” the president said of the cleanup effort and doubled down on full assistance from the federal government.
“Right now, thousands — thousands of federal personnel are deployed in the communities, supporting the search and rescue, green removal, power restoration, and getting cell networks back online,” Biden stated before committing to visiting North Carolina on Wednesday and Georgia and Florida as soon as possible. “FEMA is on the ground, supporting the communities and registering people for disaster assistance.”
Natural disasters have played a significant role in past elections. Former President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was widely criticized and likely contributed to Republicans losing control of both the House and Senate in 2006.
In 2012, then-Gov. Chris Christie’s greeting of then-President Barack Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy didn’t have a negative impact on Obama’s reelection campaign, but it did stir trouble for Christie’s 2016 primary run as a debunked rumor he had hugged Obama when greeting him on the tarmac plagued him among Republicans.
And despite a general sidelining of partisan attacks from Harris and Trump on Monday, their respective camps are already working to spin the situation.
Trump allies attacked both Harris and Biden for not yet traveling to storm-impacted areas, and the former president suggested that Biden was withholding aid from Georgia and North Carolina. Biden, Kemp, and Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) denied that claim.
“[Trump’s] lying, and the governor told him he was lying. The governor told him he’s lying. I’ve spoken to the governor, spent time with him, and he told him he’s lying. I don’t know why he does it,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday evening. “That’s simply not true, and it’s irresponsible.”
Harris allies, on the other hand, were quick to state that Project 2025, a shadow agenda connected to the Trump campaign, would shutter the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration and conduct a “review” of the National Hurricane Center.
Furthermore, Democratic operatives with close ties to Harris’s campaign recalled Trump’s own feuding with Puerto Rico as it sought to recover from Hurricane Maria in 2017. The former president waited three years to disburse $13 billion in federal aid for the territory.
The electoral stakes are especially high in North Carolina, one of the tightest contested states this cycle. Roughly 250,000 North Carolina voters requested absentee ballots ahead of Election Day, and nearly 10,000 of those came from heavily impacted Buncombe County in the western part of the state.
The storm is also expected to affect early voting, set to begin on Oct. 17, in the western part of the state still stricken by flooding.
“This is all a cascading series of disasters,” said Wake County Board of Elections member Gerry Cohen.