The hurricane X-factor in the 2024 election

Any number of October surprises could affect the 2024 election, but right now, none loom larger than the fall hurricanes.

Hurricane Helene is already the deadliest mainland hurricane since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, ripping through the swing states Georgia and North Carolina after tearing up parts of Florida. And now Hurricane Milton — currently a Category 5 storm — is bearing down on Florida in a way that officials believe could be even more catastrophic than Helene. Milton is due to make landfall Wednesday.

The immediate concern is the devastation these storms have and will wreak. But the political fight over them isn’t waiting, in large part because of Donald Trump. And the impact on the fast-approaching election is obviously a huge emerging subplot, with major implications for the future of the country.

What’s clear is that we are largely in uncharted territory so close to a presidential election and with this many key states bearing the brunt of these storms.

But what does history suggest that could mean?

The first thing to note is just how crucial these states could be — and how much even slight shifts could change the overall race.

Georgia and North Carolina, in particular, are polling extremely close. Trump leads by two points in Georgia and by less than one in North Carolina, according to The Washington Post’s polling averages. They combine for more than one-third of the electoral votes in the seven key swing states.

Red-leaning Florida is more of an afterthought in the 2024 campaign; it’s generally been thought that Democrats would win there only if they’re already well on the way to winning the presidency. But the former swing state went for Trump by only three points in 2020, and some on the Democratic side have pushed for more investment in a key U.S. Senate race there and possibly even the presidential race. If Vice President Kamala Harris somehow won Florida’s 30 electoral votes, she would very likely be elected president.

That means any impact on who votes — and how they vote — could prove hugely important in the battle for the presidency.

From there, the biggest question is how this weather affects turnout. If it does, early signs are it could hurt Trump.

That’s because the impact of Helene has been disproportionately felt in Republican-leaning areas, as The Post’s Philip Bump wrote last week. He calculated that areas with disaster declarations favored Trump by 16 points in 2020. The hard-hit areas were especially Republican-leaning in North Carolina.

Trump has noticed. During a town hall with Fox News on Monday night, he acknowledged that “Republican areas got hit very hard.”

“I believe they’re going to go out and vote if they have to crawl to a voting booth,” Trump said. He added that “we’re trying to make it convenient for them to [vote], but they just lost their house.”

There isn’t much historical precedent for the situation we find ourselves in, but the recent history we do have suggests displacement of people and hurricane-related problems can significantly dilute turnout.

The most pronounced modern example is, of course, Katrina. That hurricane hit New Orleans in August 2005, and more than half of the city’s residents had not returned by its April 2006 mayoral primary.

Turnout in that primary dropped by more than 10 percent from four years prior, and studies show it dropped by much more in the hardest-hit areas, which were disproportionately poor and Black. One study showed turnout in Black neighborhoods dropped from 63 percent of the total vote in 2002 to 57 percent in 2006; another showed Black voters themselves dropped from 62 percent of the electorate to 52 percent. Turnout in the Lower Ninth Ward, with its overwhelmingly Black population, fell by nearly 40 percent.

(The city in the years that followed saw non-Black politicians assume levels of power not seen in decades.)

That suggests that the specific areas hit and the demographic groups most affected are important factors.

There are some key differences between Katrina and Helene, of course. Even as Helene is the deadliest mainland hurricane since Katrina, the scale of death and devastation after Katrina was much greater than what’s currently understood about Helene. But Katrina also allowed a longer period of time — months — to address potential voting problems; more than 16,000 absentee ballots were sent to people who had been displaced to other parts of Louisiana, as well as Houston and other cities around the country.

Hurricane Michael hit Florida’s panhandle much closer to the 2018 election, in early October. And those areas did see a significant decline in turnout in the ensuing midterm elections — nearly 7 percent, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. That decline was notable because that 7 percent decline was greater, in terms of raw votes, than the margin of victory in a very close U.S. Senate race.

That same study argued that it wasn’t so much the hurricane that diluted turnout as it was the confusion that followed concerning the consolidation of polling places. But even that speaks to the potential voting impact of Helene; there are so many potential difficulties putting strain on people who are already dealing with much more immediate concerns than voting, as Trump noted — and little time to address them.

(North Carolina’s bipartisan board of elections has already set about making voting changes in these areas easier.)

But as Trump also noted Monday night, turnout isn’t the only big question. Another is how this might affect the choices of people who do vote — and specifically whether the government’s response will push them in one direction or another.

“I think we’re going to do great in North Carolina, because the response has been so bad to the hurricane — this response has been horrific,” Trump said.

Trump has made his case using a multitude of false claims about the hurricane response — a response that even many local Republicans have praised. But the point stands that this can matter, and both what we learn in the coming weeks about the toll of the storms and the government’s ongoing recovery efforts could shift attitudes.

George W. Bush didn’t face voters again after Katrina — he had already been reelected in 2004 — but the botched federal response to the hurricane clearly contributed to Republicans’ lopsided 2006 midterm losses (among other issues, like the Iraq War).

His father George H.W. Bush appeared to have paid a price in Florida in 1992 after a sluggish federal response to Hurricane Andrew. Bush still won Florida, but he was forced to expend extensive resources in a state he had won by more than 20 points four years earlier, and he won by only two points.

But we’ve also seen in recent years how a well-received hurricane recovery effort can help a politician.

After Superstorm Sandy — which had been a hurricane — struck the northeast less than a week before Election Day 2012, the bipartisan response was viewed as a significant asset to President Barack Obama (think: his embrace with Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie). Fully 15 percent of voters rated the response as their most important issue, and Obama won more than 70 percent of those voters. Obama also won late-deciding voters, despite those usually favoring the challenger. It might not have been decisive, but it clearly helped Obama in a very close race.

As for the areas currently facing these storms, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in 2022 earned plaudits for his response to Hurricane Ian, which struck in late September, setting Florida Republicans on course for their biggest wins in decades.

Precisely how all this will break down in the coming weeks, we don’t know. What we do know is that a stagnant 2024 election has just been injected with plenty of instability and unpredictability.