How Helene changes the election – Grist

Hello, and welcome back to state of emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. We’ve heard it time and time again: Despite what the science says, climate change is not high on Americans’ priorities at the ballot box. However, when we launched this series in August, we set the climate disasters can influence voting and elections – not just locally, but nationally. We just saw proof of that in Hurricane Helene.

Two weeks ago, the Category 4 storm carved a deadly path through the US Southeast – the first time in US history that a major disaster has hit two swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, just weeks before a presidential election .

On social media and on trips to the disaster area, former President Donald Trump made one false claim after another about the federal response to the storm, falsely claiming that President Joe Biden ignored federal aid requests from Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and that the Biden administration — and specifically Vice President Kamala Harris — spent FEMA money on housing for illegal immigrants immigrants.

Trump proxies such as representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, aided by an online army of bots, helped to create a veritable deluge of disinformation about Helene and its origins, include a barrage of allegations that FEMA is seizing supplies donated by the community. “Yes, they can control the weather,” Greene placed on X last week, legitimizing a viral conspiracy that the government targeted the hurricane in Republican counties to swing the presidential election.

“We’ve moved into a space where conspiratorial thinking has become mainstream,” said Rachel Goldwasser, who tracks far-right activity and disinformation at the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. “Every tinfoil hat out there who says the government controls the weather now feels vindicated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so too.”

The online conspiracies have real consequences: False reports about FEMA and federal relief efforts are drowning out real information that people in western North Carolina and other stricken states need to begin the recovery process, and false allegations of government wrongdoing are becoming outrageous . real militia activity in the region, Goldwasser said. There have been several reports of Proud Boys, the neo-fascist militant organization, on the ground in North Carolina and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in western North Carolina, election officials are rush to find out how to make sure residents can still cast their ballots during early voting and on November 5. Several polling places are closed, and the US Postal Service is unable to deliver mail-in ballots to several zip codes due to washed-out roads and damaged vehicles. “This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetime in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of the state’s top elections officials, said last week.

On Monday, the North Carolina Board of Elections unanimously voted to relax voting rules for counties most affected by the storm. Thirteen counties in the western half of the state can develop new early voting processes, establish more polling places and hire new poll workers if existing ones are unable to serve, among other authorizations.

“Early voting may look different in some of the 13 hardest-hit counties, but it will go ahead,” Brinson Bell told reporters. Read the full story about how Helene could sway the vote in North Carolina.

Milton approaches

Hurricane Milton exploded to Category 5 intensity yesterday as it moved eastward across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida. The storm’s exact track is still unclear, but the majority of models predict that it will make landfall tomorrow in or near Tampa Bay, one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to hurricane storm surges. The city hasn’t seen a direct hit from a hurricane in a century, but if Milton lands in the wrong place, the bay will act as a kind of funnel for storm surge, sending a huge wall of water into the heart of one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.

To make matters worse, coastal communities in west Florida are still emerging from post-Helene chaos. Thousands of tons of debris are strewn along roads, flooded residents are spilling out of their homes, and FEMA is just beginning to distribute relocation assistance to victims of last month’s storm. Gov. Ron DeSantis sent many of the state’s rescue and recovery teams to North Carolina last week to help with the disaster response there, but he recalled those teams over the weekend and is now pushing to clear as much debris as possible before Milton fall ashore .

My colleague Matt Simon has more on how Milton gained strength so quickly – read the full story here.

— Jake Bittle

What we read

Presidential candidates flex their disaster chops: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both visited areas affected by Hurricane Helene last week, with Trump visiting damaged areas in Valdosta, Georgia, and Harris surveying a devastated town in North Carolina. Each candidate accused the other of not doing enough to help storm victims.
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FEMA is out of money: Over the weekend, President Joe Biden urged Congress to return to Washington and pass a bill that replenishes FEMA’s drained disaster relief fund. The agency has said it lacks the resources to respond to a major disaster like Hurricane Milton, but House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday he would not commit to recalling lawmakers.
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Helene and manufactured housing: When Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend, it hit a region where much of the housing stock consists of mobile and manufactured homes, which are extremely vulnerable to wind and flood damage. These homes, which are not subject to local building codes, are a last resort for residents who can’t find affordable housing — and a loophole for those who can’t afford to build to hurricane standards.
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Who will pay for Helene?: Preliminary damage estimates for Hurricane Helene suggest the storm could cost more than $200 billion, but almost none of that loss will be covered by insurance. That’s because traditional homeowners insurance doesn’t cover flood damage, and most people in North Carolina and other inland states don’t carry additional flood insurance.
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A word from Al Gore: My colleague Kate Yoder sat down with former Vice President Al Gore at Climate Week to get his thoughts on where we stand in the climate battle. The Inconvenient Truth creator, who narrowly lost the 2000 election, said even he was surprised by how difficult it was to make climate progress, a fact he attributed to the strength of the oil and gas lobby.
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DeSantis dodges Harris: As Category 5 Hurricane Milton nears Tampa, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is dodging Vice President Kamala Harris’ calls about storm recovery in his state, NBC News reports. The vice president’s calls “seemed political,” a DeSantis aide said. DeSantis twice opted not to meet with President Joe Biden last week, who was in Florida surveying the damage.
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