A poorly handled hurricane can cripple a politician. Just ask George W. Bush.
A poorly handled hurricane can cripple a politician. Just ask George W. Bush.
As Americans in the Southeast continue to wade through the wreckage from Hurricane Helene, and Floridians brace for a potentially catastrophic Hurricane Milton, voters’ perceptions of the federal government’s disaster response have not yet solidified. But Republicans are doing their best to ensure that Kamala Harris, who as vice president has a limited role in disaster response, pays the political price for any failures on the part of the Biden administration.
Amid the fog of war, it’s tough to tell how many of the attacks will stick come Election Day, by which point a narrative will have crystallized in the minds of Americans about whether the Biden-Harris administration handled both hurricane aftermaths with deftness and speed.
Republicans have been amplifying concerns from Americans on the ground that the response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been inadequate and at times even harmful to recovery efforts led by local authorities and nonprofits. Some of those attacks on FEMA have been misleading, such as Trump’s claim that Americans whose homes were washed away in the flooding will receive only $750 in FEMA aid. (Those $750 payments come from the Serious Needs Assistance program, which is designed to provide for immediate needs such as food, separate from other forms of long-term relief intended to compensate Americans who lose their homes in storms.)
The White House and even some local Republicans, meanwhile, have responded by calling out online right-wingers for spreading “misinformation” about the disaster during a time of crisis.
“Politics just gets infused into these natural-disaster responses,” says Republican strategist Dave Kochel. An effective federal response can earn plaudits. An inept or politically tone-deaf response can prove costly.
Given these political dynamics, Biden and Harris “should be in the business of saying yes” to state and local officials, says Kochel. “Get the aid out as quickly as you can, make sure the money’s moving, make sure that the answer is always yes, because you make it more difficult for Trump to charge them with saying, ‘They’re not responding. They’re not doing everything they can.’”
The vice president’s every move, social-media post, and photo-op is under intense scrutiny. Republicans have lambasted Harris for a photo she posted of herself on Air Force Two, in which it appeared that her headphones were not plugged in to her phone. They’ve also criticized her decision to post on social media over the weekend that the White House is sending $157 million to Lebanon “to help those who have been displaced by the recent conflict” (referring to Israeli military actions against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon), a statement Republicans panned as tone deaf amid the fallout from Hurricane Helene.
“North Carolina is underwater, and you’re sending that [message] out? It’s crazy,” Republican strategist and CNN contributor Scott Jennings said in an interview with NR. “There’s a lot of debate going on about FEMA and spending priorities and that’s fine. But to me, the great scandal here is just, why was Biden at the beach? Why was Harris in California? Why did it take so long to mobilize the United States military? Why does everything take so long, and why is everything permeated with all these bizarre photo ops?”
Harris appeared at a Los Angeles fundraiser on September 29 as the storm traveled through the Southeast, while Biden spent the weekend at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Del.
The photo-op element for Harris is especially important, adds Kochel, “because images are what campaigns are built around, and we’re going to see all kinds of devastation.” He mentioned the image of Trump throwing paper towels to a crowd at a hurricane-relief center in Puerto Rico back in 2017, and the infamous 2005 photo of former president George W. Bush looking out of Air Force One’s window at the wreckage wrought by Hurricane Katrina, as crystallizing moments for Americans. “Go back in history and just think about the ramifications of the Hurricane Sandy hug” between former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and then-president Barack Obama in 2012 “and how riled up that got people during those times.”
GOP strategist Alex Conant, who served as a White House spokesman in the Bush administration during Hurricane Katrina, said Bush never fully recovered from the hurricane aftermath, which was “just devastating politically.”
“I think you need to have images of the politicians on the ground, consoling survivors, supervising cleanup,” he said. “And that’s why after the hurricane a few weeks ago, you saw Biden, Harris, and Trump all rushed to the disaster zone. Because I think those images are important. People want to see them and I think they’re powerful images and something that the public now expects, as opposed to 70 years ago where nobody would have expected a president to go to a natural-disaster zone.”
In addition to Bush’s fly-over photo debacle, Conant says the federal government decided to stand back and let local authorities lead on Katrina relief efforts, which led to criticism of the administration when local authorities offered a lackluster response.
Hurricane responses offer politicians a chance to work together across the aisle. But storm responses also carry political risks when efforts are mismanaged or photo ops turn into photo flops.
Republicans have also criticized Harris’s team for picking a fight with Florida governor Ron DeSantis by leaking to the press that he did not pick up her phone calls to talk about hurricane preparations. On the tarmac, she accused DeSantis of being “selfish,” “irresponsible,” and playing “political games.”
Asked at a news conference about Harris’s apparent outreach, DeSantis said he saw the news reports but wasn’t aware that she reached out — before tearing into her for inserting herself into the crisis.
“It’s not about you, Kamala,” the Florida governor said on Fox & Friends. “It’s about the people of Florida. My focus is exactly where it should be, and I can tell you this, I’ve worked on these hurricanes under both President Trump and President Biden, neither of them ever tried to politicize it, she has never called on any of the storms we have had since she’s been vice president until apparently now. Why all of a sudden is she trying to parachute in and inject herself? When she’s never shown any interest in the past? We know it’s because of politics. We know it’s because of her campaign.”
Harris’s partisan bickering is the opposite of what Americans want to see; North Carolina–based Democratic strategist Doug Wilson tells NR that images of bipartisanship during storm responses — like that between Biden and DeSantis — can spark hope among voters, particularly those in hard-hit areas.
But the unprecedented nature of the race makes it difficult to predict whether the storm responses will have any impact on it, he says.
“We’ve never had an election where there’s a former president running after losing four years ago, an African-American woman at the top of the ticket, and in the midst of all that, two assassination attempts on the former president,” he said, adding, “oh, and on top of that, changing out a Democratic nominee less than 60 days before the election. So, it’s so hard to say whether or not a Category 4 hurricane hitting Florida, and depending on the government’s response to that hurricane, is going to make independents or Republicans or Democrats switch sides.”
Perhaps the biggest impact on the election could be roadblocks to voter turnout as a result of the storm fallout in battleground North Carolina. The Trump campaign on Tuesday called on state officials “to swiftly enact an expansion of voter access for North Carolinians who live in the areas of the state suffering from the impact of Hurricane Helene.”
Around NR
• Four weeks out from Election Day, Trump superfans at his recent Butler, Pa., rally were beginning to wrestle with the possibility of a Kamala Harris victory, Audrey Fahlberg reported on the ground:
The reality that Trump’s days as a candidate are numbered is difficult for voters, politicians, and pundits of all political stripes to grasp nearly a decade after the former president won the 2016 GOP primary and remade the party in his image. For his biggest supporters, there are doubts whether anyone — even his most loyal lieutenants — can replicate the 78-year-old former president’s persona if he loses and steps aside in 2028.
• Charles C. W. Cooke warns readers not to believe the hype — Florida is going to vote Republican:
Florida is not “in play.” It’s going to vote for Donald Trump and Rick Scott at the federal level, and for a Republican-run legislature at the state level. Were I betting on it, I’d put Trump’s final margin closer to seven or eight, but, given the way things have been going here of late, I wouldn’t be shocked if it hit double digits.
• Jim Geraghty points to an ominous indicator for Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana:
In the Trump era, it has proven exceptionally difficult to win a Senate race if your state is voting for the other party in the presidential race. In 2016 and 2020, there were 69 Senate races. Only one time — Susan Collins in 2020 — did a Republican win while the Democratic candidate was winning the presidential vote in the state, and even that one comes with a caveat, as Trump won one electoral vote in Maine last cycle.
• Rich Lowry responds to Kamala Harris’s recent gaffe on The View where, asked what she would have done differently from President Biden during the past four years, she said there’s “not a thing that comes to mind”:
The root of the problem . . . is that she hasn’t distanced herself from Biden on anything, which is bizarre given that she’s trying to position herself as the candidate of change.
To sign up for The Horse Race Newsletter, please follow this link.