Lunch hour was busy at the Haywood County Public Library in Canton, North Carolina, where the midterm election wasn’t the only thing on people’s minds as they cast early ballots on October 19. The region has seen a lot of natural disasters in the past few years, and many residents are still rebuilding after Hurricane Helene. Repeated flooding has unsettled Sandra Moody, a straight-ticket Republican voter.
“Well, we’re not weather people,” Moody said with a hoarse laugh, “but these floods that keep coming. They’re supposed to be 500 year floods. You’re like, ‘What is going on?’”
Two years after the storm, recovery remains far from complete. Helene caused nearly $60 billion in damage and recovery needs, and about $10 billion in federal assistance has been provided so far. Even after accounting for state funding and insurance payments, the state pegs the unmet need at roughly $41 billion.
Half of all North Carolinians are dissatisfied with the government’s response, compared to 37 percent who are satisfied, according to a poll commissioned by television stations WRAL and WSOC. In Western North Carolina, which bore the brunt of Helene’s fury, just 5 percent said they are “very satisfied” with how officials are handling things.
The lingering dissatisfaction looms over two surprisingly competitive races closely tied to the recovery. North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, which includes much of the area hit hardest by Helene, is considered a toss-up. In the state’s Senate race, Democrat Roy Cooper, who was governor when the storm hit, has maintained a double-digit lead over Republican Michael Whatley, whom President Donald Trump tapped as his point person on the recovery.
This is something of a reversal from the 2024 election. As Republicans campaigned in Helene’s immediate aftermath, the party hammered the Biden administration over its response to the disaster. Two years later, Republicans control the White House, Congress, and the federal agencies responsible for the recovery.
Trump, who joked that he wouldn’t send North Carolina additional aid if Whatley lost, has drawn connections between aid and the election in other races. He announced $17.9 million in disaster assistance for Wisconsin while promoting Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany. He also approved an Ohio disaster declaration just before campaigning with Republican Senator Jon Husted but left 15 others pending. Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile, promised $858 million to North Carolina during a recent campaign stop near Asheville.
The White House has denied that disaster decisions are politically motivated, but the episodes underscore a question hanging over the midterms: Politicians are treating recovery as an electoral issue. It is much less clear whether voters are doing the same.
Western North Carolina offers one place to look for an answer. NC-11 encompasses 16 largely rural, mountainous counties along with solidly Democratic Asheville. Trump carried the district by 9.5 points in 2024, and its voters have sent three successive Republicans to Congress: Mark Meadows, Madison Cawthorn, and Chuck Edwards.
But Republican Jennifer Balkcom, who entered the race three months ago after Edwards withdrew, is running even with Democrat Jamie Ager. A pro-Trump political action committee recently canceled more than $1 million in television advertising supporting Balkcom, and the race is considered a toss-up.
For some voters, Helene figures into the election for reasons beyond the recovery. Maggie Panther, a Democrat voting early in Canton, said the storm reinforced her concerns about climate change and the increasingly severe weather it is bringing. “I hate to sound totally partisan, but I know that there’s one party that’s trying to do something about climate change, and there’s one party that is denying it,” she said. “And so, I vote accordingly.”
Ager, a fourth-generation farmer whose grandfather served three terms in Congress, has focused on the economic impact of the storm and on the many residents who are still awaiting FEMA reimbursement and struggling to rebuild.
“We were trying to do everything we could to get back up on our feet here at the farm and everywhere else,” Ager said. “As time kept dragging on and recovery was clearly insufficient, [we were] hearing from neighbors and folks in the community about their frustrations.”
Helene has become an issue in the Senate race as well, though the questions about recovery center more directly on Whatley’s role in the federal response.
Whatley’s role in the recovery — widely described as Trump’s “Helene recovery czar” — has haunted him in the campaign. A recent investigation by the Asheville Citizen-Times found no communication between Whatley and FEMA in the two years after the storm, with only six text messages and five phone calls documented between Whatley and a state official coordinating hurricane recovery. The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, has pulled its financial support from the race as Cooper maintains a healthy lead in the polls.
Cooper and Whatley have blamed each other for the slow pace of Helene aid while defending their own records. Neither agreed to an interview, but commented by email. Whatley’s campaign said he helped “deliver more aid for Hurricane Helene than any other natural disaster” in the state’s history. Cooper’s campaign argued that Whatley “has completely failed in his role as federal recovery czar” and said the state has received just 16 percent of the funding it needs.
But despite sparring over Helene, mailers and ads for both campaigns are shifting attention to economics and crime.
Political scientist Chris Cooper at Western Carolina University says Helene has figured less prominently in campaign ads and mailers than he expected. That may be because neither candidate has much to gain from drawing attention to an unpopular recovery.
“One reason why Hurricane Helene hasn’t come up quite as much during this election is because both candidates have some experience that might allow folks to blame them for what almost everyone agrees was a poor response,” said Cooper, who is not related to the former governor.
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The WRAL/WSOC poll supports that idea. Despite the candidates’ attempts to blame one another, it found no meaningful difference between Cooper and Whatley supporters in their views of the government’s response to Helene. It follows a pattern that Cooper has previously seen after hurricanes, which until Helene had largely impacted the eastern part of the state.
“I cannot think of a single disaster in North Carolina or elsewhere, where afterwards public opinion was, ‘Boy, we really got this recovery right,’” he said. Generally speaking, voters tend to blame the government in general, he said, which means someone who wasn’t involved with the response, like Ager, may have a better shot at winning.
Research suggests that disasters can influence how voters judge elected officials. Penny Liao, an economist at the think tank Resources for the Future, said incumbents can benefit from a strong response and timely aid, while a poor recovery can work against them.
“The disaster itself is usually not very good news for the incumbent, but if there is large aid or a timely response, generally the incumbent can potentially benefit from it,” she said. On the other hand, a failure to prepare for a disaster or a poor response “is not going to be rewarded.”
Whether that dynamic is playing out in North Carolina may become clearer after the election. Political responsibility for Helene spans parties and levels of government: a Democratic administration was in the White House when the storm hit, a Republican one has overseen much of the recovery, while a Democratic governor and Republican-controlled legislature share power in Raleigh.
Residents remain deeply dissatisfied with the recovery, and two races closely linked to Helene have become unexpectedly competitive. But so far, voters’ frustration is easier to measure than its effect on their votes, and it may well be that whoever is in office during a troubled recovery, regardless of party, will pay a political price.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Helene haunts the midterms in North Carolina on Oct 28, 2026.
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I am from Haywood County. When I go home to and see old friends the chat will invariably circle around to something political. They will state things like Sandra Moody says and I can see in their eye they almost get it but they can not let go of the GOP propaganda because their fundamentalist Christian beliefs. As we say in the mountains these people will cut off their nose to spite their face.
