By BILL BARROW
RUTHERFORDTON, N.C. — Renee Kyro already has voted for Republican nominee Donald Trump for the third consecutive presidential election. But she plans to volunteer for the first time, reaching out to her neighbors in hurricane-battered western North Carolina to make sure they have a voting plan amid a flurry of precinct changes.
“I want to say I’m confident he wins, but I’m worried that people are just overwhelmed and may need some help or encouragement,” she said, standing outside an early voting site in the conservative stronghold of Rutherford County. “I just can’t imagine Kamala Harris as president.”
To the east, in heavily Democratic Winston-Salem, Dia Roberts described the fear that has her writing postcards urging voters to back Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee.
“Donald Trump is a narcissist, a liar, a wannabe dictator,” said Roberts, an independent who has voted for Democrats in the Trump era. “This should not even be close.”
But it is.
And the presidential race in North Carolina is playing out in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and alongside a governor’s race in which the Trump-endorsed GOP nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, has seen his campaign collapse amid multiple controversies, potentially splintering GOP unity.
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are ramping up their activity here again after the storm. Trump has three North Carolina stops Monday, including a visit to see storm damage in Asheville. Former President Bill Clinton appeared last week with Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, and followed with several visits in eastern 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 second defeat and, in the process, makes history as the first woman, second Black person and first person of south Asian descent to reach the Oval Office.
“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.
Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes have gotten more attention from Harris and Trump than other battlegrounds. But North Carolina and Georgia are the next largest swing states, with 16 electoral votes each. While Georgia yielded Democrat Joe Biden’s closest victory margin four years ago, it was North Carolina that delivered Trump’s narrowest win: less than 75,000 votes and 1.3 percentage points.
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.
Harris on Monday was targeting suburban Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — holding a series of conversations with Republican Liz Cheney that will be moderated by Bulwark publisher and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.
Hurricane Helene displaced thousands of voters
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?” Especially, Shumaker added, if Republicans “continue to have ballot erosion in the urban-suburban areas.”
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.
Democrats are running both on Helene and Mark Robinson
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.
Democrats hope Robinson’s latest struggles, centered on CNN’s revelations that the state’s first Black lieutenant governor once called himself a “Black Nazi” and posted lascivious statements on a porn website, turn thousands of Cooper-Trump voters into supporters of Harris and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Stein. Robinson has denied the allegations and sued CNN, calling its report defamatory.
In his campaign appearances last week, Walz took care to make two points beyond the usual pitch to any swing-state audience: He offered condolences and promised continued federal assistance to Helene victims, and he declared that Robinson “will never be the governor of North Carolina.”
Said Murdock: “We are definitely making it clear how extreme the Republican ticket is.”
At the least, Trump’s dominance over the GOP has moved some of the state toward Harris, said Robert Brown, a High Point attorney who came to hear Walz. Just 16 years ago, Brown was on the other side of the aisle as Republican nominee John McCain’s state director against Obama.
Trump’s nomination in 2016, Brown said, pushed him to register as an independent and vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. “Then after Jan. 6, I moved all the way over” and registered as a Democrat, he said.
“I’ve just become more and more scared 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 was McCain. “This really isn’t that hard for me and for 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.
___ Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story stated that Appalachian State University remained closed and would reopen by Election Day. The campus partially reopened last week and will be fully operational by Election Day.
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