(Bloomberg) — Hurricane Helene is shaking up the presidential race, leaving a path of devastation in crucial swing states and forcing the rival campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to pivot to address the disaster.
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Vice President Harris scrapped plans Monday morning in battleground Nevada to instead head back sooner to Washington for a briefing on the storm from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Former President Trump is visiting Georgia, one of the states affected, where he will receive a briefing on the storm and help distribute relief supplies.
President Joe Biden said he intended to visit North Carolina by the end of the week. Biden said there were reports of over 100 people dead and that 600 were still unaccounted in the storm’s wake.
The scale of the devastation around Asheville, North Carolina, and the surrounding region was still coming into focus Monday. Even as floodwaters recede, the region is gripped by power outages, mudslides and supply shortages.
The storm cut a path through several states, including Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. The latter two are among the presidential race’s seven battleground states, likely to determine the outcome of November’s election.
Earlier: Hurricane Helene Halts Poultry Plants, Damages Cotton Crops
Biden addressed the recovery efforts on Monday morning from the White House, seeking to assure the public the administration is marshaling the full resources of the federal government to aid communities hit hard by the storm and telling those affected that they would be there “as long as it takes to finish this job.”
“I’ve directed my team to provide every, every available resource as fast as possible to your communities,” Biden said, noting that he has approved emergency declarations in seven states and disaster declarations in three of them. “We know there’s more to do and we’ll continue to surge resources.”
The president said he expected to seek supplemental funding from Congress, and could even request lawmakers return from their pre-election recess to Washington.
“It’s not just a catastrophic storm, it’s a historic, history-making storm,” Biden said. “Communities are devastated.”
Past Disasters
Harris has also said she would visit impacted communities when appropriate and when her presence wouldn’t disrupt emergency response operations.
The natural disaster is poised to be a critical moment in the race with about five weeks until Election Day. How presidents and candidates respond to such incidents can be pivotal in shaping voter perceptions of their effectiveness in office and their empathy. In 2012, then-President Barack Obama earned plaudits for his embrace of then-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, after Hurricane Sandy battered the Northeastern seaboard shortly before that year’s election.
Trump drew criticism in office over his administration’s handling of the response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated swathes of Puerto Rico. The then-president clashed with the island’s leaders and when he visited San Juan after the storm, he famously threw rolls of paper towels into a crowd — a move critics cast as callous but which Trump has defended.
Biden has long held a reputation as an empathetic president eager to comfort victims of disasters and visit impacted communities, but that image was undercut by the wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui in 2023 – with local residents faulting the response of state and federal officials.
That criticism was fueled by the president telling reporters “no comment” when he was asked about deaths from the wildfires while on vacation in Delaware. Biden was again at his Rehoboth Beach home as Helene ravaged North Carolina over the weekend, but defended his efforts to coordinate a federal response.
“I was commanding,” Biden said. “I was on the phone for at least two hours yesterday and the day before as well. I command; it’s called a telephone.”
Trump Criticism
Trump castigated Harris over the weekend for proceeding with a west coast trip that included fundraisers in California even as Helene was making landfall last week.
“Why is Lyin’ Kamala Harris in San Francisco, a City that she has totally destroyed, at fundraising events, when big parts of our Country are devastated and under water – with many people dead?,” he wrote in a post Sunday on his Truth Social network.
Harris visited the US-Mexico border on Friday, held a pair of weekend fundraisers that brought in $55 million and held a rally Sunday evening in Nevada, another crucial battleground. She scrapped events in Nevada on Monday to return to Washington sooner.
Harris leads Trump 50-48 in North Carolina, while the two are tied 49-49 in Georgia among likely voters, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll published last week and conducted before the storm. Both results are within the margin of error.
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