Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. We’ve heard it time and again: Despite what the science says, climate change does not rank high among Americans’ priorities in the ballot box. When we launched this series in August, however, we made the case that climate disasters can influence voting and elections — not just locally, but nationally. We’ve just seen proof of that in Hurricane Helene.

Two weeks ago, the Category 4 storm carved a deadly path through the U.S. Southeast — the first time in American history that a major disaster has hit two swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, just weeks ahead of a presidential election.

“Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”

— Rachel Goldwasser, Southern Poverty Law Center

On social media and on trips to the disaster zone, former President Donald Trump has made one bogus claim after another about the federal response to the storm, falsely alleging that President Joe Biden has been ignoring federal aid requests from Georgia’s Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, and that the Biden administration — and Vice President Kamala Harris, specifically — spent FEMA money on housing for illegal immigrants.

Trump proxies like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, aided by an online army of bots, helped fuel a veritable deluge of disinformation about Helene and its origins, include a barrage of claims that FEMA is confiscating community-donated supplies. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X last week, legitimizing a viral conspiracy that the government aimed the hurricane at Republican counties in order to swing the presidential election.

“We’ve moved into a space 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 that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”

The online conspiracies have real-world consequences: False reports about FEMA and federal aid efforts are drowning out real information people in western North Carolina and other ravaged states need in order to begin the recovery process, and false claims about government malfeasance are galvanizing far-right militia activity in the region, Goldwasser said. There have been multiple reports of Proud Boys, the neo-fascist militant organization, on the ground in North Carolina and Tennessee.

A woman mounts an American flag to a stack of cinderblocks outside her friend’s destroyed mobile home (at right) in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene flooding in Swannanoa, North Carolina.
Roxanne Brooks mounts an American flag to a stack of cinderblocks outside her friend’s destroyed mobile home (at right) in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene flooding in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Mario Tama / Getty Images

Meanwhile, in western North Carolina, election officials are racing to figure out how to make sure residents can still cast their ballots during early voting and on November 5. Several polling locations are shut down, and the U.S. Postal Service can’t deliver mail-in ballots to multiple ZIP codes because of washed-out roads and damaged vehicles. “This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes 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 loosen voting rules for counties most affected by the storm. Thirteen counties in the western half of the state can develop new early-voting processes, establish more voting sites, and appoint new poll workers if existing ones are unable to serve, among other authorizations.

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

Milton approaches

“There are no good scenarios.”

— Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist for WFLA, Tampa Bay’s NBC affiliate

Hurricane Milton exploded to Category 5 intensity yesterday as it barreled eastward across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida. The storm’s precise track is still unclear, but the majority of models predict it will 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 seen a direct hit from a hurricane in a century, but if Milton lands in the wrong spot, the bay would act as a kind of funnel for storm surge, pushing a huge wall of water into the heart of one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.

A NOAA image of Hurricane Milton showing its eye
Hurricane Milton at 16:30 on Monday, October 7, 2024. CIRA / NOAA

To make matters worse, coastal communities in western Florida are still emerging from post-Helene chaos. Thousands of tons of debris are strewn along roadways, flooded residents are mucking out their houses, and FEMA is just starting to distribute displacement assistance to the victims of last month’s storm. Governor Ron DeSantis last week sent many of the state’s rescue and repair crews up to North Carolina to aid in the disaster response there, but he recalled those crews over the weekend and is now pushing to clean up as much debris as possible before Milton makes landfall.

My colleague Matt Simon has more on how Milton gained strength so fast — read the full story here.

— Jake Bittle

What we’re reading

Presidential candidates flex their disaster chops: 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 destroyed town 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 urged Congress to return to Washington and pass a bill replenishing FEMA’s drained disaster relief fund. The agency has said it lacks the resources to respond to a major disaster like Hurricane Milton, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said on Sunday that he wouldn’t commit to calling lawmakers back.
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Helene and manufactured housing: When Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend, it struck 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 aren’t subject to local building codes, are a last resort for residents who can’t find affordable housing — and a loophole for those who can’t afford to build to hurricane standards.
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Who’s going to pay for Helene?: Preliminary damage estimates for Hurricane Helene suggest the storm could cost more than $200 billion, but almost none of that loss will be covered by insurance. That’s because traditional homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover flood damage, and most people in North Carolina and other inland states don’t carry 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 creator, who lost the 2000 election by a hair, said even he has been surprised by how difficult it has been to make climate progress, a fact he attributed to the strength of the oil and gas lobby.
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DeSantis is dodging Harris: As Category 5 Hurricane Milton draws near Tampa, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is dodging Vice President Kamala Harris’s calls about storm recovery in his state, NBC News reports. The vice president’s calls “seemed political,” a DeSantis aide said. DeSantis twice chose not to meet last week with President Joe Biden, who was in Florida surveying the damage.
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