How Helene is changing the election – Grist

Hello and welcome back to the state of emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. We’ve heard it time and time again: Contrary to what the science says, climate change is not at the top of Americans’ ballot priorities. However, when we started this series in August, we represented climate Disasters can influence votes and elections – not just locally, but nationwide. We just saw proof of this with Hurricane Helene.

Two weeks ago, a Category 4 storm cut a deadly path through the southeastern United States – the first time in American history that a major disaster struck two swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, just weeks before a presidential election.

On social media and while traveling to the disaster zone, former President Donald Trump made one bogus claim after another about the federal response to the storm, falsely claiming that President Joe Biden had ignored requests for aid from Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp . and that the Biden administration — and Vice President Kamala Harris in particular — has spent FEMA funds to house illegal immigrants.

Trump officials like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, aided by an online army of bots, have helped fuel a torrent of disinformation about Helene and her origins, including a barrage of claims , which FEMA claims is confiscating supplies donated by the community. “Yes, you can control the weather,” Greene posted last week

“We’ve moved into an area 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-world consequences: False reports about FEMA and federal relief efforts are masking the actual information that people in Western North Carolina and other devastated states need to start the recovery process, and false ones Allegations of government wrongdoing mobilize widespread people. The activity of right-wing militias in the region will be affected, said Goldwasser. There have been multiple reports of Proud Boys, the neo-fascist militant organization, on the ground in North Carolina and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, election officials in western North Carolina are grappling with how to ensure residents can continue to cast their ballots during early voting and on Nov. 5. Several polling stations are closed and the U.S. Postal Service is unable to deliver mail. in voting on multiple zip codes due to washed out roads and damaged vehicles. “This storm is unlike anything we have seen in our lifetime in Western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of the state’s top election officials, said last week.

On Monday, the North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to relax election rules for counties hit hardest by the storm. Thirteen counties in the western half of the state can, among other things, develop new early voting procedures, add more polling places and appoint new poll workers if existing ones are unable to do so.

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

Milton approaches

Hurricane Milton reached Category 5 intensity yesterday as it swept east across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida. The storm’s exact direction is still unclear, but most models expect it to make landfall tomorrow in or near Tampa Bay, one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to hurricane storm surge. The city hasn’t been directly hit by a hurricane in a century, but if Milton made landfall in the wrong place, the bay would act as a kind of funnel for storm surge, driving a huge wall of water into the heart of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.

Making matters worse, coastal communities in western Florida are still trying to navigate the post-Helene chaos. Thousands of tons of debris lie strewn across streets, flooded residents are cleaning out their homes and FEMA is just beginning to distribute relocation aid to victims of last month’s storm. Gov. Ron DeSantis sent many of the state’s rescue and repair crews to North Carolina last week to help with disaster relief efforts there, but he recalled those crews over the weekend and is now pushing to clear as much debris as possible before Milton reached the country.

My colleague Matt Simon shares more about how Milton rose to strength so quickly – Read the full story here.

— Jake Bittle

What we read

Presidential candidates show their disaster: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both visited areas affected by Hurricane Helene last week, with Trump touring damaged areas in Valdosta, Georgia, and Harris surveying a devastated city 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: President Joe Biden over the weekend called on Congress to return to Washington and pass a bill to replenish FEMA’s depleted disaster relief fund. The agency said it lacked the resources to respond to a major disaster like Hurricane Milton, but House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that he would not commit to recalling lawmakers.
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Helene and prefabricated houses: When Hurricane Helene hit Big Bend, Florida, it hit a region where a large portion 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 unable to find affordable housing — and a loophole for those who can’t afford to build to hurricane standards.
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Who should pay for Helene?: Preliminary damage estimates for Hurricane Helene suggest the storm could cost more than $200 billion, but almost none of that will be covered by insurance. That’s because traditional home insurance doesn’t cover flood damage, and most people in North Carolina and other inland states don’t have 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 fight. The Inconvenient truth The creator, who narrowly lost the 2000 election, said even he had been surprised at how difficult it had been to make progress on climate change, a fact he attributed to the strength of the oil and gas lobby.
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DeSantis sidesteps Harris: As the Category 5 Hurricane Milton approaches Tampa, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is dodging calls from Vice President Kamala Harris for recovery from the storm in his state, NBC News reports. The vice president’s calls “seemed to be political,” a DeSantis aide said. DeSantis twice last week skipped meeting with President Joe Biden, who was in Florida to survey the damage.
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