Previous hurricanes have reduced voter turnout in hard-hit areas and both helped and hurt incumbents. This fall’s storms affect particularly crucial electoral regions.
Updated: 33 minutes agoWorkers, community members and business owners clean up debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, N.C., last week.
What’s clear is that we are largely in uncharted territory so close to a presidential election and with this many key states bearing the brunt of these storms.The first thing to note is just how crucial these states could be - and how much even slight shifts could change the overall race. That’s because the impact of Helene has been disproportionately felt in Republican-leaning areas, as The Post’s Philip Bump wrote last week. He calculated that areas with disaster declarations favored Trump by 16 points in 2020. The hard-hit areas were especially Republican-leaning in North Carolina.
Turnout in that primary dropped by more than 10 percent from four years prior, and studies show it dropped by much more in the hardest-hit areas, which were disproportionately poor and Black. One study showed turnout in Black neighborhoods dropped from 63 percent of the total vote in 2002 to 57 percent in 2006; another showed Black voters themselves dropped from 62 percent of the electorate to 52 percent.
That same study argued that it wasn’t so much the hurricane that diluted turnout as it was the confusion that followed concerning the consolidation of polling places. But even that speaks to the potential voting impact of Helene; there are so many potential difficulties putting strain on people who are already dealing with much more immediate concerns than voting, as Trump noted - and little time to address them.
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