Hurricanes set to scramble swing-state map a month before election

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Homes and businesses in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina in the path of last month’s Hurricane Helene and the impending Hurricane Milton aren’t the only things being thrown into chaos.

The same can be said about the electoral map itself in two swing states and a third where polling shows November’s election could be close.

St. Petersburg, Florida on the western peninsula is underwater after the devastation from Hurricane Helene. AP

In Georgia and North Carolina, which have 16 electoral votes each and therefore together more than a third of the 88 at stake in the seven states seen as battlegrounds this cycle, questions remain about whether voters will get to exercise their franchise.

In the interregnum between landfalls of the two major hurricanes on his state, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested people in the Blue Ridge Mountains not getting to vote could be a gift to Kamala Harris — whose administration hasn’t exactly been adroit in managing storm impacts this season.

“If you look at Georgia and North Carolina, the path that this took is probably, I would say 2-to-1 Republicans in the path of that,” DeSantis said last week on “The Dana Show.”

Unless special dispensation is made for those voters, DeSantis expects a “noticeable drop-off in the turnout,” particularly in western North Carolina, where communities have been ravaged and even removed from the map by flooding, landslides and other destruction Helene brought.

The Florida governor is right about how close these states are, both historically and this cycle. 

Trump lost the Peach State by roughly 11,000 votes in 2020, and he is clinging to a 1.5-point lead on average in recent polls, per RealClearPolitics. 

And while the former president won the Tar Heel State by more than a percentage point in 2020, North Carolina polls on average show less of a margin for Trump this cycle, with 0.6 points separating him from Harris.

So yes, devastation of Republican redoubts in the North Carolina mountains could lead to a massive swing in the election.

But it remains to be seen how incentivized North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper — a Democrat who was on the shortlist of potential Harris running mates – will be to ensure universal suffrage for those who may frustrate his political aims.

But as anyone with a weather app knows, Milton is menacing Florida and potentially threatening elections in that state, where 30 electoral votes are at stake and many polls say the outcomes of the presidential and Senate races may be too close to call. 

Some projections see the Cat 5 monster grinding its way up Interstate 4 like a malevolent tourist, leaving wreckage from Tampa to Orlando before crawling into the Atlantic Ocean near Daytona Beach. 

Of course, this would affect a lot beyond election administration. There is nothing more political than the aftermath of a hurricane, given FEMA funding woes, the blame game played by officials amid the cascade of storm-fueled catastrophes, the infrastructural devastation and ultimately the human toll.

Every serious storm depicts in sharp relief how fragile civilized society really is, as the “You Loot, We Shoot” signs outside devastated houses and businesses reveal with increasing regularity.

But the paradox is this: While what has happened already in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida (and the second helping of such headed to the Sunshine State) is big-time tragedy, the national implications (beyond those felt in the insurance market and FEMA budgets) could be the election itself.

And Republicans who have spent years talking about “election security” and sounding the alarm about absentee ballots find themselves embracing creative solutions, such as what Florida has done already in letting displaced people vote using temporary addresses to receive mail ballots.

That solution is in place in many GOP-heavy counties after Hurricane Helene, but the I-4 corridor historically is a swing region, and if Florida’s close in four weeks, that move will invite scrutiny.

Man plans, God laughs. That old saying is illustrated all too often.

And with what political pros like to call the most important election of our lifetimes already underway, the antiseptic rhetoric of election administration will be tested by chaos on the ground, forcing ad hoc changes that could raise questions in the fog of the aftermath.