By james art RUTHERFORDTON, N.C. (AP) — Renee Cairo has already voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump for a third straight presidential election. But she plans to volunteer for the first time, reaching out to her neighbors in hurricane-ravaged western North Carolina to make sure they have a plan to vote amid a wave of redistricting.
“I mean, I’m convinced he’s winning, but I’m worried that people are just overwhelmed and might need 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, Daya Roberts described the fear that drove her to write postcards urging voters to support Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
“Donald Trump is a narcissist, a liar, a would-be dictator,” said Roberts, an independent who has voted Democratic in the Trump era. “That shouldn’t even be close.”
But it is.
And North Carolina’s presidential race comes in the wake of Hurricane Helen and alongside a gubernatorial race in which the Trump-backed GOP candidate, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, suffered a campaign meltdown amid a host of controversies, potentially fracturing the unity of The Republican Party.
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been ramping up activity here again since the storm. Trump has three stops in North Carolina on Monday, including a visit to see storm damage in Asheville. Former President Bill Clinton appeared last week with Harris Vice President Tim Waltz and followed up with several visits to eastern North Carolina.
With 15 days to go until Election Day, North Carolina is crucial in the Electoral College math that will decide whether Trump gets an encore in the White House or Harris hands him a second defeat and, in the process, makes history as the first woman the second black and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office.
“We’re going to win or lose the presidency based on what happens in North Carolina,” Republican Chairman Michael Watley, a North Carolina resident, said last week as part of a GOP bus tour.
Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes have drawn more attention from Harris and Trump than other battleground states. But North Carolina and Georgia are the next largest states with 16 electoral votes each. While Georgia gave Democrat Joe Biden the closest victory four years ago, it was North Carolina that gave Trump the smallest victory: less than 75,000 votes and 1.3 percentage points.
North Carolina is expected to cast as many as 5.5 million votes, with more than 1 million votes already cast since early voting began last Thursday.
On Monday, Harris targeted suburban Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — holding a series of conversations with Rep. Liz Cheney that will be moderated by Bulwark publisher and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.
Hurricane Helena displaced thousands of voters
Many North Carolina counties affected by Hurricane Helin moved precincts on Election Day 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-leaning Asheville, was hit hard. Appalachian State University in Boone, the other stronghold of Democratic votes in the mountain region, remains closed. But the surrounding western counties, including Rutherford, add more GOP votes than the Democratic gains in Asheville and Boone. This leaves both sides scrambling to verify turnout operations and their math.
“We’re working every channel we can, you know?” Whatley said. “We will have phone calls. We will do direct mail. We’re going to do email and digital — basically anything we can do to let people know where to go.”
Republicans like Krio, who lives a short drive from the devastated Chimney Rock community, said she knows “a lot of Trump supporters who lost everything” and others who remain in their homes but don’t have reliable Internet or phone connections and may do not know their polling place.
“I’ll go door to door if I have to,” she said.
Yet Trump and the 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 coin toss before the storm,” said Republican pollster Paul Shoemaker. “The critical question will be: How will rural turnout compare to urban and suburban turnout?” Especially, Shoemaker added, if Republicans “continue to have an erosion of urban and suburban turnout.”
State Sen. Natalie Murdoch, who serves as political director for the state’s coordinated Democratic campaign, said the party has the apparatus to reach target voters in the disaster zone. Field workers in some of the state’s more than two dozen Democratic offices have been involved in recovery efforts, distributing water and other supplies to residents. Murdoch noted that Appalachian State is slated to be open before Election Day, with students able to vote in their usual precinct on campus.
Democrats are running for both Helen and Mark Robinson
Even before Helene, North Carolina was even more compelling because of its history of split-ticket voting. It is one of the few states where gubernatorial races run concurrently with presidential races. Democrats have won the presidential election only once since 1992 (Barack Obama’s 2008 victory). Republicans have won just one gubernatorial race over the same period. Four years ago, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper won re-election by 4.5 points, even though Trump edged out Biden. It is now term-limited.
Democrats are hoping that 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 lewd statements on a porn website, will turn thousands of Cooper-Trump voters into supporters of Harris and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein. Robinson denied the allegations and sued CNN, calling their reporting defamatory.
In his campaign appearances last week, Walz made sure to make two points beyond his usual pitch to any swing-state audience: He offered condolences and promised continued federal aid to Helen victims, and said Robinson “will never be governor of North Carolina.
Murdoch said: “We’re definitely making clear how extreme the Republican ticket is.”
At the very least, Trump’s dominance of the GOP has turned some of the state toward Harris, said Robert Brown, a High Point attorney who came to hear Waltz. Just 16 years ago, Brown was across the aisle as state director for Republican nominee John McCain against Obama.
Trump’s 2016 nomination, Brown said, prompted him to register as an independent and vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. “Then after Jan. 6, I moved completely” and registered as a Democrat, he said.
“I’m just getting more and more scared and disillusioned with 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. “It’s really not that hard for me and some other Republicans and former Republicans.”
___
Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or distributed without permission.