On the menu today: A deep dive into the presidential race in North Carolina and the state’s efforts to mitigate the hurricane’s impact on voting, and Tim Walz brags about what he doesn’t know.
Let’s Talk about the Weather
Charlotte, N.C. — Okay, the third stop on Jim’s Kinda Unplanned Election 2024 Swing-State Tour is an extremely brief one, because as you read this, I’m at a stopover at Charlotte International Airport. But technically, since Sunday, I’ve been on the ground in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and now the Tarheel State. I will spare you my survey of the people behind the counter at Auntie Annes, Bojangles, and Cinnabon.
For much of the past year, I contended that North Carolina was not a swing state — Joe Biden was a much weaker candidate now than in 2020, and a man struggling to keep his job-approval rating above 40 percent was in no shape to win a state that he had lost four years ago. In fact, Biden hadn’t led a poll in North Carolina since 2023. But then the Democrats switched in Kamala Harris as the nominee, and her numbers in the state were much more competitive.
The numbers are still close, but if you’re looking for a reason to believe Donald Trump will win North Carolina, Harris hasn’t led any of the last eleven polls making up the RealClearPolitics average, and you have to go hunting to find one she’s led over at FiveThirtyEight.
This is a reddish-purple state. Both North Carolina senators are Republicans, the 14-member delegation to the U.S. House is evenly split between the parties, and Republicans have a 60 percent majority in each chamber of the legislature. Current Democratic governor Roy Cooper is an unstoppable machine who has won seven statewide races since 2000, and you may have heard about the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, boldly attempting to bridge the longstanding divisions between blacks and Nazis.
The state’s history also points to Republicans; while Biden came close four years ago, the only time a Democrat has won the presidential race in North Carolina since 1980 was Barack Obama in 2008 — and even in that year, while Obama was winning the national popular vote by 7.2 percent (!), he won the Tarheel State by about three-tenths of a percentage point.
Based upon that, you would think that North Carolina is the kind of state where the Democratic nominee needs everything to go right, or a major national wave, to win.
But then there’s the X factor of Hurricane Helene.
Governing magazine looked at the voter-registration data for the 25 counties in FEMA’s designated Helene disaster area in western North Carolina and found more than 1.2 million registered voters; within that group about 491,000 are unaffiliated, about 480,000 are registered Republicans, about 292,000 are registered Democrats, about 2,900 are registered with the “No Labels” party, and about 500 are registered Greens.
The county that likely got it worst — “Biblical devastation” — was Buncombe County, home of Asheville. Life is very slowly inching back to the outer edges of normalcy there; some restaurants have reopened, but the Buncombe County school district does not know when the schools will reopen. Asheville public schools are aiming to reopen for half-days on October 28.
The region’s congressman, Republican Chuck Edwards, reports that “[Monday], Transylvania County public school students went back to school and [Tuesday], Henderson and Haywood County students are returning to the classroom, with other counties returning to school in the coming days.”
The good news is that the state and every affected county and local government are doing everything possible to make it easy for voters in the affected areas to cast their ballots, either early or on Election Day.
Early voting in North Carolina starts October 17 and runs until November 2. There are 419 early voting sites statewide, and 76 of the 80 sites in the 25 counties heavily affected by the hurricane will be able to open. For those who feel like there’s no such thing as bipartisan cooperation anymore, the response from North Carolina’s local and county elections officials, state legislators, and executive branch has been exactly what the state needed:
[Cliff Marr, director of elections in Polk County, N.C.] says the response by the state officials has been phenomenal. “They came to us, asked us ‘What are the things you need?’” he says. “That’s what they took back [to the statehouse], and the Legislature’s backing it up.”
The modifications allowed in affected counties offer strategies to accommodate voters who have been displaced and infrastructure that has been destroyed or damaged, including polling places themselves. Before they are implemented in a county they must be approved by a majority bipartisan vote of its county election board.
Emergency measures allow for such things as addition, removal and relocation of polling places, including to other precincts or adjacent counties. Polling places may serve voters from more than one precinct. Voters are allowed to return an absentee ballot in a county other than the one in which they are registered during the early voting period (Oct. 17-Nov. 2). . . .
The board in Buncombe County, one of the most severely impacted and populous in the disaster area, has already announced its revised plan for early voting, which includes new times and locations for early voting. . . .
The bill from the General Assembly allows a bipartisan majority to adopt the measures it believes are needed. In Marr’s experience, bipartisanship is the norm among county election boards in his state. They have five members — two from each party and one appointed by the governor. In nine years, he’s never seen a vote along party lines, he says.
This doesn’t mean we won’t see any drop-off in turnout in western North Carolina. There’s no erasing the effects of the hurricane, and some people may be so consumed with the enormous and arduous tasks of rebuilding their homes and their lives, and mourning their dead, that voting seems like a low priority now. All the state can do is pull out all the stops to make it as easy and convenient as possible to cast a ballot.
All North Carolina residents must show a photo ID when they check in to vote; if they cannot, they will be given a provisional ballot and the county board of elections will determine if they are eligible to vote in that election.
One other turnout concern for Democrats: Charlotte is the 15th-largest city in the country, and its surrounding county, Mecklenburg, is two-to-one in favor of Democrats. But as the New York Times has reported, significantly fewer Democrats turn out there compared to other cities in the state:
Despite laying claim to more registered Democrats than any other county in the state, Mecklenburg has consistently underperformed for the party. In the 2022 midterms, only seven of North Carolina’s 100 counties had a lower voter turnout than Mecklenburg. For the 2020 presidential election, the county’s turnout was two to seven percentage points lower than those of other major Democratic counties in the state, including Wake, which includes Raleigh. . . .
Of the states Mr. Trump won in 2020, North Carolina was his narrowest victory, with a margin of 74,000 votes. That year, about 64,000 fewer votes were cast in Mecklenburg County than in Wake County, even though they have similar numbers of Democratic voters.
The Harris campaign is running a 60-second ad in Georgia and North Carolina, focusing on presidential responses to natural disasters. The commercial features Kevin Carroll, former senior counsel to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, saying “[Trump] would suggest not giving disaster relief to states that hadn’t voted for him.” And Olivia Troye, a former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, saying, “I remember one time after a wildfire in California, he wouldn’t send relief because it was a Democratic state. So, we went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas to show him, ‘These are people who voted for you.’ This isn’t normal. The job of the president is to protect Americans regardless of politics.”
Why Is Tim Walz Bragging about What He Doesn’t Know?
I am tempted to steal a page from Charlie Cooke and write a column entitled “Tim Walz Is an Idiot.”
The Minnesota governor already admitted, during the vice-presidential debate, to being a “knucklehead”; he’s now on the trail, in his own words, “trying to do my best, at times saying stupid things.” He’s gone rogue and called for the abolition of the Electoral College,
In his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, Walz said that on the morning after Election Day, “I plan on waking up on November 6 with Madam President.” Either Gwen Walz is running for president, or Walz is confessing something shocking, or he mangled his words again.
Now, campaigning in Volant, Pa., dressed up like Johnny Carson’s Floyd R. Turbo, Walz said of his GOP rival, “J.D. Vance is a venture capitalist cosplaying as a cowboy or something. I don’t even know what a venture capitalist does most of the time.”
Well, governor, Investopedia defines a venture capitalist as “a private equity investor who provides capital to companies with high growth potential in exchange for an equity stake.” Governor, have you ever seen Shark Tank? Have you ever seen Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, offering some small businessman some pile of money to expand their business, in exchange for part ownership? That’s what a venture capitalist does.
Last week, Walz completed a big campaign-fundraising swing through the West Coast, including Seattle, La Jolla, and California governor Gavin Newsom’s home in Fair Oaks. Did he have no idea what a bunch of those donors did for a living?
(Note the state of Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development has a Venture Capital Investment Program.)
Walz is just doing his cornpone Elmer Fudd Red Green schtick, right? The governor of Minnesota, who had a vote in Congress for twelve years, does know what a venture capitalist is, right? He’s just pretending not to know, because he thinks his audience doesn’t know . . . right?
Or is this more like Walz’s completely wrong, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test” statement, a sign that somehow he has risen to the top level of American politics without knowing some extremely basic information about the world he lives in?
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it earlier in the week, contemplating the dark new turn in little Greta Thunberg’s activism, and wondering how certain figures become the Next Big Thing overnight and often disappear just as quickly.