In North Carolina, Trump and Harris navigate a hurricane and a rollercoaster governor’s race

RUTHERFORDTON, N.C. — Renee Kyro has already voted for the Republican candidate Donald Trump for the third consecutive presidential election. But she plans to volunteer for the first time and reach out to her neighbors in hurricane-ravaged western North Carolina to make sure they have a voting plan amid a series of changes in the district.

“I want to say I’m confident he will win, but I’m afraid people are just overwhelmed and might need some help or encouragement,” she said, standing outside an early voting site in conservative stronghold Rutherford County stood. “I just can’t imagine Kamala Harris as president.”

To the east, in heavily Democratic Winston-Salem, Dia Roberts described the fear that drives her to write postcards urging voters to support Harristhe vice president and Democratic candidate.

“Donald Trump is a narcissist, a liar, a wannabe dictator,” said Roberts, an independent who voted for Democrats in the Trump era. “This shouldn’t even be close.”

But that’s what it is.

And the presidential race in North Carolina is set in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and in addition to a gubernatorial race in which Trump-backed Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has seen his campaign collapse amid multiple controversies, potentially splintering Republican Party unity.

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are ramping up their activities here after the storm. Trump has three stops in North Carolina on Monday, including a visit to view storm damage in Asheville. Former President Bill Clinton appeared last week with Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, and followed up with several visits in eastern North Carolina.

With fifteen days left until Election Day, North Carolina is crucial to the Electoral College math that will decide whether Trump gets an encore from the White House or whether Harris hands him a second defeat, making history as the first woman in the process , the second Black person and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office.

“We’re going to win or lose the presidency depending on what happens in North Carolina,” Republican National Chairman Michael Whatley, a North Carolinian, said during a GOP bus tour last week.

Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes have received more attention from Harris and Trump than other battleground states. But North Carolina and Georgia are the next largest swing states, with sixteen electoral votes each. While Georgia delivered Democrat Joe Biden’s largest margin of victory four years ago, it was North Carolina that delivered Trump’s smallest victory: fewer than 75,000 votes and 1.3 percentage points.

North Carolina is expected to cast as many as 5.5 million votes, while more than 1 million votes have already been cast since early voting started last Thursday.

Harris focused on the suburbs of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on Monday – and had a series of conversations with Republican Liz Cheney which 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 have moved Election Day precincts or changed early voting locations. Thousands of voters were left displaced or without power or water as early voting began.

Buncombe County, home to left-wing Asheville, was hit hard. Appalachian State University in Boone, the other cache of Democratic votes in the mountainous region, remains closed. But surrounding western counties, including Rutherford, combine to produce more Republican votes than Democrats’ gains in Asheville and Boone. That leaves both parties struggling to control the exchange operations and their math.

“We use every channel we can, you know?” Whatley said. “We’re going to make a phone call. We’re going to do direct mail. We’ll do 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 “a lot of Trump supporters who have lost everything” and others who continue to live at home but don’t have reliable internet or phone connections and may not know where they live. polling station location.

“If I have to, I’ll go door to door,” she said.

Yet Trump and Republicans never built the same campaign infrastructure as Harris — or that of President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race in July.

“It was a coin before the storm,” said Republican pollster Paul Shumaker. “The critical question will be: How will rural turnout compare to urban and suburban turnout?” Especially if Republicans continue to experience “ballot erosion in urban and suburban areas,” Shumaker added.

State Sen. Natalie Murdock, who also serves as political director for Democrats’ coordinated campaign in the state, said the party has the machinery to reach their target voters in the disaster zone. Field workers at some of the more than two dozen Democratic offices across the state have been carrying out recovery efforts and distributing water and other supplies to residents. Murdock noted that Appalachian State is expected to be open before Election Day, with students able to vote at their usual campus area.

Even before Helene, North Carolina was all the more attractive because of its history of split-ticket voting. It is one of the few states where gubernatorial races run concurrently with presidential contests. Since 1992 (Barack Obama’s narrow victory in 2008), Democrats have won the presidential election only once. Republicans have won just one gubernatorial race during the same period. Four years ago, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper won reelection by 4.5 points, despite Trump outpacing Biden. It now has a limited term.

Democrats hope Robinson’s latest battle, which centers on CNN’s revelations that the state’s first black lieutenant governor once called himself a “black Nazi” and posted salacious statements on a porn website, will enlighten thousands of Cooper-Trump voters supporters of Harris and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh will change. Stone. Robinson has denied the allegations and indicted CNN calls the report defamatory.

During his campaign appearances last week, Walz made sure to make two points outside the usual pitch for any swing-state audience: He offered his condolences and promised continued federal aid to Helene’s victims, and he declared that Robinson “never will be the governor of North Africa’. Carolina.”

Murdock said, “We are making it absolutely clear how extreme the Republican ticket is.”

At the very least, Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party has shifted some of the state toward Harris, said Robert Brown, a High Point attorney who came to hear Walz. Just sixteen years ago, Brown stood across the aisle as state director for Republican candidate John McCain against Obama.

Trump’s nomination in 2016, Brown said, prompted him to register as an independent and vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. “After Jan. 6, I completely moved” and registered as a Democrat, he said.

“I have just become more and more fearful and disillusioned about the direction of the party and the country,” he explained, adding that he sees Harris as a center-left pragmatist who is as strong on national security as McCain. “This really isn’t that hard for me and some other Republicans and former Republicans.”

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Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.