“All politics is local”, said the late Tip O’Neill, America’s Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 80s. A revered Democrat, were he still alive, he might be casting a keen eye on North Carolina, and the awful devastation wrought on much of the state by Hurricane Helene.
While the world’s attention over the weekend was focused on the Middle East, the future of American governance may hinge on efforts to reach the stranded, find the missing and restore basic services – electricity, water, internet – in the city of Asheville, a much beloved retreat for east coast residents drawn to its arts scene, its historic architecture and its bohemian culture.
As President George W Bush learned during the crisis sparked by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, American voters are unforgiving of botched efforts to deal with major storms.
With more than 40 dead, and millions spending the weekend without power, Asheville is now ground zero for Governor Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s top Democrat, who has campaigned alongside Vice President Kamala Harris on numerous occasions and was on the short-list to become her running mate.
“To say this caught us off-guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, the local sheriff, who described Asheville as facing an unprecedented crisis.
The city spent the weekend cut off from the rest of the United States (an experience New Orleans endured when Katrina lashed the Big Easy).
“Biblical devastation,” said local officials on Saturday, with much of the western part of North Carolina inundated with up to 30 inches of water, threatened by mudslides, and its authorities struggling to understand the scale of human casualties.
President Joe Biden said he was “deeply saddened” by the loss of life, and vowed that the federal government will “be with you every step of the way. We are not going to give up… we will make sure that no resource is spared”.
Both he and Harris received numerous briefings about the situation, and ordered Deanne Criswell, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to travel to the region and assess the damage for herself.
Across America, nervous family members of the missing spent an anxious weekend, desperately trying to secure news of their loved-ones.
“The gas stations are out of gas – the ones that aren’t under water – and the grocery stores that are open are letting shoppers in one at a time,” one New Yorker awaiting news of three family members told i.
“Lower income folks in lower lying areas will have the worst of it… we often get residual hurricane weather, but this is unprecedented.”
For Harris, the next few days could be critical. North Carolina is a must-win battleground state in America’s presidential election.
Early voting in the state is due to begin in just over a fortnight. Democrats were hopeful they could win the state, thanks to an ongoing crisis besetting one top Republican official – Governor Mark Robinson, who was recently accused of posting racist and sexist messages on the forum of a pornographic website more than a decade ago.
But now, Hurricane Helene and its handling by both the White House and Cooper may come to be a significant electoral factor.
The politics of the storm could quickly get very complicated for the two presidential candidates. The crisis in Asheville affords former President Donald Trump a fresh opportunity to assail the leadership of the White House, if he is sufficiently disciplined to seize it.
On Saturday, however, he seemed more focused on the size of the crowd that had greeted him when he attended a US football game in Alabama. Earlier, at a rally in Wisconsin, he described Harris as “mentally disabled”, and dismissed her visit to America’s southern border on Friday as “bullshit”.
Harris, by contrast, may seek to remind voters in the campaign’s remaining weeks of the unprecedented efforts by the Biden administration to prioritise the issue of climate change. Hurricane Helene is the latest indicator that it is not only coastal areas of the United States that are now in the direct firing line of increasingly powerful storms.
But first, North Carolinians stranded by Helene require rescue, emergency shelter and access to mobile phone services to contact their families outside the state.
How the Biden administration and Cooper, Harris’ political ally in North Carolina’s gubernatorial mansion, handle the crisis could prove consequential in the battle for votes.
