Mudslides, misinformation and an urgency to vote in western North Carolina

BLACK MOUNTAIN, N.C. — Carolyn Burgess, 71, drove on cracked and crooked roads in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to get to her polling place Thursday, the state’s first day of early voting. Hurricane Helene had devastated her town, and its 8,500 residents were divided on the government response.

Burgess agreed with the Republican she was supporting for president: “Trump is right,” she said, standing in line to vote at the Black Mountain Public Library. “FEMA isn’t doing enough.”

Toward the back of the line was Matthew Slauson, 68, a Democrat fed up with former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the Biden administration’s handling of the disaster. “Catastrophes around the country are happening more and more,” he said. “That’s why everyone here needs to vote.”

Scarred by the extraordinary amounts of rain that unleashed deadly flooding and road-crushing mudslides last month, the people of western North Carolina are heading into voting booths with a difficult new question in mind: Which candidates will best help them heal and rebuild after one of the worst natural disasters in the United States in decades?

In interviews, most voters who showed up Thursday morning at the library in Black Mountain, a purplish town in left-leaning Buncombe County, said they had long made up their minds about whom to support.

Still, many said the federal and state responses to the storm, and the torrent of misinformation about them, had made them even more determined to get their neighbors to a polling place and help ensure their presidential candidate takes North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes.

The political consequences of the storm remain unclear: Christopher A. Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, conducted an analysis of 2020 voting data and found that in 13 counties affected by Helene, roughly 55% of the votes went to Trump, and 45% to President Joe Biden.

Though most counties in the region are dominated by Republicans, its largest city, Asheville, is heavily Democratic. Low turnout there could prove critical in close statewide races.

Black Mountain residents are well aware of the stakes for their region, where officials have verified 95 storm-related deaths and have said that nearly 100 people remain missing.

Some voters said their enthusiasm for Trump had been dampened by the lies he has uttered about the disaster.

Meagan Bergmann, 36, said she had voted for Trump before and was planning to again. But when she regained internet service at her home, she read some of his false claims, including that Vice President Kamala Harris had spent “all her FEMA money” on housing for people who had entered the country illegally, or that the state government had provided “no helicopters, no rescue” for stranded residents.

“We don’t need someone who’s going to talk bullcrap about this area,” Bergmann said, noting that she had decided to vote for Harris. “I got swayed pretty hard once I went online and saw all the misinformation going around.”

Burgess, a Republican, said her reaction to Trump’s false claims about FEMA was, “What? That’s not true.” Still, she believed Trump would be better than Harris for business.

Asked if the storm or comments about it from politicians had affected how she would vote, Jackie Tatelman, 71, a Democrat, smiled. “No,” she said. “I was pretty clear who I was going to vote for, so that didn’t factor in.”

The Harris ticket, she said, “is going to be more likely to help the people who actually need to be helped, and without judgment.” The possibility of low turnout in Buncombe County, however, causes her to worry about Harris’ chances of being the first Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina since 2008.

Jake Quinn, chair of the Buncombe County Board of Elections, said he fears turnout will be lower because of the storm. In 2020, 78% of registered voters turned out. This year, the goal had been 80%.

“That’s not going to happen,” Quinn said. “There’s too much stuff going on. There’s too many people who are displaced. There are too many folks who are just not going to have their eye on this.”

The North Carolina State Board of Elections said this month that about 10 early voting sites in western North Carolina had significant damage or accessibility issues. But the board approved several emergency measures, including allowing local officials to designate alternative polling places.

Across the state Thursday, more than 353,000 people cast ballots, a record for first day of early voting.

On Highway 9 in Black Mountain, where flooding had turned steep, rough roads into dangerous and dilapidated one-ways, Jim Reising, 68, had posted a message in bold, black letters.

“VOTE EARLY,” read a cardboard sign outside his partially destroyed property, where a faded Trump flag, torn during the storm, had been rehung. It billowed as waves of volunteers, firefighters and power utility crews drove by and Reising offered them food and water.

“I’m worried a lot of people here aren’t going to vote because we’re still crawling back to life,” he said. He raises bulls, and had named one of the strongest “Trump.” From now until Election Day, Reising said, he planned to encourage his Republican neighbors to briefly put down their chain saws and excavators and head to the Black Mountain Public Library.

“This is our future,” he said.

Virginia Bennett, who wore a pink Trump hat to the library on Thursday, said that while she had seen the military helping everywhere since the storm, she still believed the federal response had been inadequate.

“It made me not like Biden and Harris even more,” she said.

Bennett was one of several Republican voters in Black Mountain who said they had been disturbed by a CNN report linking their party’s embattled nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, to lewd and disturbing online comments made more than a decade ago. Most said they would still vote for him; a few said they would leave that part of the ballot blank.

If there was one thing voters all felt Thursday, it was their enthusiasm about seeing so many neighbors show up on the first day of early voting, after all they had endured.

“To see us doing this means so much,” Elaine Bearden, 67, a Democrat in Asheville, said through tears. “The privilege is to vote. And a lot of people have made this possible.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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