WASHINGTON – A pair of unwelcome and destructive guests named Helene and Milton have stormed their way into this year's presidential election.
The back-to-back hurricanes have jumbled the schedules of Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, both of whom devoted part of their recent days to tackling questions about the storm recovery effort.
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The two hurricanes are forcing basic questions about who as president would best respond to deadly natural disasters, a once-overlooked issue that has become an increasingly routine part of the job. And just weeks before the Nov. 5 election, the storms have disrupted the mechanics of voting in several key counties.
Vice President Harris is trying to use this as an opportunity to project leadership, appearing alongside President Joe Biden at briefings and calling for bipartisan cooperation. Former President Trump is trying to use the moment to attack the administration's competence and question whether it is withholding help from Republican areas, despite no evidence of such behavior.
Adding to the pressure is the need to provide more money for the Small Business Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which would require House Republicans to work with the Democratic administration. Biden said Friday that Hurricane Milton alone had caused $50 billion in estimated damages.
“Dealing with back-to-back crises will put FEMA under more scrutiny and, therefore, the Biden administration will be under a microscope in the days leading up to the election,” said Timothy Kneeland, a professor at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York, who has studied the issue.
“Vice President Harris must empathize with the victims without altering the campaign schedule and provide consistent messaging on the widespread devastation that makes FEMA’s work even more challenging than normal,” Kneeland added.
Already, Trump and Harris have separately gone to Georgia and North Carolina to assess hurricane damage and pledge support, requiring the candidates to cancel campaign events elsewhere and use up time that is a precious resource in the final weeks before any election. Both Georgia and North Carolina are political battlegrounds, raising the stakes.
The hurricane fallout is evident in the candidates' campaign events as well.
On Thursday, the first question Harris got at a Univision town hall in Las Vegas came from a construction worker and undecided voter from Tampa, Florida. Ramiro Gonzalez asked about talk that the administration has not done enough to support people after Helene and whether the people in Milton's path would have access to aid — a sign that Trump’s messaging is breaking through with some potential voters.
Harris has called out the level of misinformation being circulated by Republicans, but her fuller answer revealed the dynamics at play just a few weeks before an election.
“I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” she said.
On the same day, Trump opened his speech at the Detroit Economic Club by praising Republican governors in the affected states and blasting the Biden-Harris administration.
“They’ve let those people suffer unjustly,” he said about those affected by Helene in North Carolina.
The storms have also scrambled the voting process in places. North Carolina’s legislature passed and Gov. Roy Cooper signed this week a law that helps people in 25 affected counties with more ways to vote. Florida will allow some counties greater flexibility in distributing mail-in ballots and changing polling sites for in-person voting. But a federal judge in Georgia said Thursday the state doesn't need to reopen voter registration despite the disruptions by Helene.
Tension and controversy have begun to override the disaster response, with Biden on Wednesday and Thursday saying that Trump has spread falsehoods that are “un-American.”
Candace Bright Hall-Wurst, a sociology professor at East Tennessee State University, said that natural disasters have become increasingly politicized, often putting more of the focus on the politicians instead of the people in need.
“Disasters are politicized when they have political value to the candidate," she said. "This does not mean that the politicization is beneficial to victims.”
As the Democratic nominee, Harris has suddenly been a major part of the response to hurricanes, a role that traditionally has not involved vice presidents in prior administrations.
On Thursday, she participated virtually at a Situation Room briefing on Milton while she was in Nevada for campaign activities. She has huddled in meetings about response plans and on Wednesday phoned into CNN live to discuss the administration's efforts.
At a Friday briefing with Biden to discuss the hurricanes, Harris repeated a message that subtly ties back into her campaign policies to stop price gouging.
“To any company or individual that is using this crisis to jack up prices through illegal fraud or price gouging, whether it be at the gas pump, the airport or the hotel counter, we will be monitoring and there will be a consequence,” Harris said.
Her newfound importance was such that Biden was nudged to wrap up his remarks so she could speak, prompting him to joke, “She's my boss here.”
Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida late Wednesday and left more than 3 million without power. But the storm surge never reached the same levels as Helene, which led to roughly 230 fatalities and for a prolonged period left parts of North Carolina without access to electricity, cell service and roadways.
Trump and his allies have seized on the aftermath of Helene to spread misinformation about the administration's response. Their debunked claims include statements that victims can only receive $750 in aid as well as false charges that emergency response funds were diverted to immigrants.
The former president said the administration's response to Helene was worse than the George W. Bush administration's widely panned handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which led to nearly 1,400 deaths.
“This hurricane has been a bad one, Kamala Harris has left them stranded," Trump said at a recent rally in Juneau, Wisconsin. “This is the worst response to a storm or a catastrophe or a hurricane that we’ve ever seen ever. Probably worse than Katrina, and that’s hard to beat, right?"
Asked about the Trump campaign's strategic thinking on emphasizing the hurricane response, campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it reflects a pattern of “failed leadership” by the Biden-Harris administration that also includes the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and security at the U.S. southern border.
“Kamala has left Americans behind and proven she is not equipped to solve crises at the highest level," Leavitt said.
John Gasper, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has researched government responses to natural disasters, said storm victims generally want to ensure foremost that they get the aid they need.
“These disasters essentially end up being good tests of leadership for local, state and federal officials in how they respond," he said.
But Gasper noted that U.S. politics have gotten so polarized and other issues such as the economy are shaping the election, such that the debate currently generating so much heat between Trump and the Biden-Harris administration might not matter that much on Election Day.
“On the margin, it will matter," he said. "Will it define the election? Probably not. There’s so many other things out there.”
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AP writer Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.