Hurricane Helene’s Political Disaster

By Ryan Bonifay October 18, 20241/2

Hurricane Helene devastated large swaths of western North Carolina, with entire towns wiped away or forever altered. The human disaster will be felt for decades. But there’s another impending disaster no one is talking about – a political one.

North Carolina is a perennial swing state with a penchant for split-ticket voting. In 2020, Donald Trump won the state by less than 1.5 percentage points. In 2008, Barack Obama clinched the state for the Democrats by a mere 14,000 votes out of 4.3 million votes. This year, North Carolina is once again a battleground state, with both political parties spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and both presidential nominees are spending significant time here. In the Tar Heel State, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are literally fighting for every single vote.

But Hurricane Helene didn’t just wipe out towns. It may also wipe out people’s right to vote. Tens of thousands of voters are homeless or temporarily camped out far from their homes. While the North Carolina Board of Elections is tweaking rules to make it easier to vote, residents in the most severely damaged areas probably have other, bigger problems on their minds – like missing relatives, lost livelihoods, children who can’t go to school, filing insurance claims, just to name a few. The last thing on their to-do lists is remembering to reregister to vote at their new address before Oct. 6, which has since come and gone.

There is an unspoken question that needs to be voiced:What happens if hundreds of thousands of voters in western North Carolina can’t vote in the 2024 election?

The disaster declaration in western North Carolina encompasses 25 counties, comprising 1.3 million registered voters, of which 974,514 voted for president in 2020.

Currently,registered Republicans make up 37.9% of western North Carolina voterscompared to 28.2% in the rest of the state. Registered Democrats make up only 22.8% of western North Carolina voters compared to 33.2% in the rest of the state. In 2020, Trump won 604,119 votes to Joe Biden’s 356,902 votes in those 25 counties.

In other words, western North Carolina is Republican country, even with deep blue Asheville sitting in the heart of the mountains. In the closest election in recent history, Republicans don’t have 600,000 votes to spare.

In order for a Republican candidate to have a fighting chance of winning statewide in North Carolina, they have to drive up their margin of victory in the western part of the state. Since 2016, Republican presidential and Senate candidates have won by a margin of 23.4% to 27.9% in western North Carolina. In those same elections, all Republicans (Trump, Tillis, Budd), except former Sen. Richard Burr, also lost the rest of the state.

Compare those margins to losing Republican candidates. In 2016, the incumbent governor, Pat McCrory, won western North Carolina by 19.3%. Four years later, Republican Dan Forest only eked out an 18.7% margin in the west. McCrory lost the rest of the state by 4.4%, and Forest lost it by 9.5%.

In other words, statewide Republicans can’t win North Carolina without soaking up every red vote to the west.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/10/18/hurricane_helenes_political_disaster_151797.html

>>21790996

2/2

As of Oct. 7, absentee ballot requests in western North Carolina totaled 46,094, accounting for 15.7% of statewide requests. Some of those ballots will never reach their intended recipients. That is concerning, but the bigger impact will come from in-person early voting, slated to begin October 17. In 2020, 70% of Trump’s vote in western North Carolina came from in-person early voting sites. It is not yet clear how many early voting sites are damaged, but the wide expanse of Helene’s damage suggests it will be significant. According to Axios, “infrastructure, accessibility to voting sites, and postal services remain severely disrupted” in 13 counties, accounting for 552,514 registered voters.

With North Carolina growing increasingly close,hundreds of thousands of Tar Heel voters who are unable to vote could doom Republicans chances here – and nationwide – over the next 27 days. While it is possible for Trump to win 270 electoral votes while losing North Carolina, it makes a narrow path to the White House that much narrower.

Playing around with the electoral map produces a number of scenarios in which Trump comes short of 270 electoral votes without North Carolina. One scenario gives Trump Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania while losing Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. He loses that election 265 to 273.

Getting western North Carolina back on its feet has to be the priority for the federal and state governments.

However, with such an important election at our doorstep, it would be irresponsible to ignore the political implications of this historic disaster. It’s not just about disenfranchising voters – which is important enough.

Imagine for a moment that this election comes down to a razor-thin margin in storm-torn North Carolina. Allegations start flying – about lost ballots, late ballots, ballots sent to the wrong precincts, etc. It will be Florida circa 2000 on steroids, and nobody wants to go through that again. Our country is already fraying at the seams with little trust in our democratic institutions. Talk about throwing a match into a powder keg.

To prevent this election outcome from being dictated by a 100-year storm, it is incumbent on the Board of Elections to do absolutely everything in its power to make sure western North Carolinians,especially those in rural and most isolated parts of the impacted area, have every opportunity to cast their ballots. It’s also incumbent on Republicans to start tackling this problem now. Don’t wait until Nov. 6 to sound the alarm.

No one wants to politicize a storm that has destroyed so many lives, but that’s exactly what will happen if we don’t get this right.

Ryan Bonifay is the director of data & analytics at ColdSpark and lives in Lexington, North Carolina. Bonifay has worked and served as data director for several campaigns and organizations across the southeast, including the Republican National Committee, Engage Texas, Texans for Greg Abbott, and former U.S. Senator David Perdue.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/10/18/hurricane_helenes_political_disaster_151797.html

COMMENTARY:Are Minorities Voting Increasingly Like Normies?

By Michael Barone October 18, 20241/2

Not everything significant politically is happening just in the target states.

"Never seen anything like this in thirty years,"said California Republican consultant Mike Madrid in an X post, referencingthe sharp increase in Republican registration among California's minority voters, including the state's numerous Latinos, growing numbers of Asians, and decreasing number of Blacks.

This is especially evident among Latinos, as shown by mock elections in the state's majority-Hispanic public schools, in which former PresidentDonald Trump got 18% of voters in 2020 and 35% so far this year.

These changes are not going to make California go Republican on Nov. 5, but they're part of a nationwide Republican trend among so-called minorities that may help Trump carry several target states with large percentages of Hispanics (Arizona and Nevada) and Blacks (Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania).

Definitive confirmation of what has been scattered evidence comes from the latest, very highly rated New York Times/Siena poll, which oversampled Hispanics and Blacks. The outlet's chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, reported last weekend that Trump is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by 78%-15% among Blacks and by only 56%-37% among Hispanics.Trump, Cohn said, "might well return to the White House by faring better among Black and Hispanic voters combined than any Republican presidential nominee since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964."

This not only alarms but also puzzles many Democrats. Commenters responded in disbelief to Madrid's post.

"I cannot think of 1 single thing that Trump has or will do for Latinos," said Lisa Grande.

"Specifically, why?" asked DebJM. "GOP has no policy that benefits either group. In fact, they stigmatized all those groups mentioned."

Something similar came from as exalted and successful a political analyst as former President Barack Obama.

Speaking in Pittsburgh last Thursday, the former president, who won 365 and 332 electoral votes (of 538) in 2008 and 2012, respectively, upbraided Black voters, especially men.

"Part of it makes me think – and I'm speaking to men directly," he said, "that, well, you just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president."

Similar to a jazz artist improvising on a theme, Obama continued, "Women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time. … And now, you're thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you because you think that's a sign of strength because that's what being a man is? Putting women down? That's not acceptable."

It's not generally considered good persuasion tactics to accuse voters of bigotry and insist they confess error, but Obama seemed to be appealing to a longtime theme in Black politics. Any reporter who's watched a Democratic candidate speak in Black churches has heard preachers call for unity. The virtual unanimity of Black voters over many years, for Republicans from 1865 to the 1930s, and for Democrats since 1964, is a rational response by voters who are conscious of being part of a discriminated-against minority and who want to maximize their political clout.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/10/18/are_minorities_voting_increasingly_like_normies_151801.html

>>21791158

2/2

That seems natural in aparty that historically has always been a coalition of outgroups in a diverse society, minorities who, taken together, can form a national majority. Thus, the commenters on Madrid's post are puzzled that Hispanics and Blacks might vote for a Republican Party that, in their view, offers them no policies addressing their specific plight.

They might be less puzzledif they hit their New York Times app andread Cohn's analysis. He points out that nearlyhalf of Hispanic and Black voters support a southern border wall and deportationof illegal immigrants. About half of minorities, like half of whites, say big-city crime is out of control. Majorities of blacks and Hispanics =favor an "America first" foreign policy.

Moreover, under 30% of Blacks and Hispanics rate the economy positively, and61% of Hispanics and 25% of Blacks, for whom the economy is the most important concern, favor Trump. As the Democratic Party becomes dominated by left-wing woke progressives and more liberal white college graduates, attitudes rooted in history that had prompted Blacks and Hispanics to vote near-unanimously or heavily Democratic have been thrust aside.

Near-majoritiesof Hispanics and substantial numbers of Blacks have become, in Ruy Teixeira's, a liberal patriot writer, phrase,"normie voters."Just as in their daily lives,I suspect, they live similarly to normie Americans.

The rigid and often violently imposed regime of segregation and subordination described in anthropologist John Dollard's 1937 "Caste and Class in a Southern Town" has been long gone, and increasingly,though not completely, Black Americans go about working, shopping and enjoying leisure activities without stigma or disrespect.

As for Hispanics, to whom civil rights protections were applied in the 1970s on the assumption that they would be treated similarly to segregation-era Southern Blacks, that assumption was never accurate, and the cessation of Mexican immigration for a decade after the housing and financial crisis of 2007-08 provided time for assimilation.

Let us go back to where this column started: California. I see a historical analogy. Just as the largely midwestern migration there in 1940-65 led to Democratic victories and then, in response to the Watts riot and Berkeley rebellions, the 1966 turn to the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, the largely Mexican migration in 1982-2007 led to Democratic victories, andnow, in response to the Biden inflation, illegal immigration and COVID-19 lockdowns, we're seeing a 2024 movement toward the populism of Trump.

If the Democratic Party has always been a coalition of outgroups,when members of an outgroup start feeling like normies, they may turn to the Republicans, who have always been centered on a core group of people regarded as typical Americans. While this process goes on, we may see the two parties in very close balance.

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/10/18/are_minorities_voting_increasingly_like_normies_151801.html