ASHEVILLE, NC — A few people trickled into the office of Buncombe County Democrats for canvassing on a sunny afternoon near Asheville, North Carolina, 12 days before the election. Only a few maps laid were out for Harris-Walz volunteers, eclipsed by those for a local race.
The chair of the local Democratic Party had a sticky note with a list of the precincts with the most registered Democrats who have still not voted: One was a ghost town the last time people tried to knock on doors, another almost completely destroyed from the floods.
The call sheets for phone calls were not set up. “We’re not doing that yet,” Kathie Kline, Buncombe County’s Democratic Party chair, said when a volunteer asked if they could phone bank, turning them away for the day.
That is the way days were generally going for the once-robust Democratic volunteer operation in the mountains of western North Carolina, a must-win county for the party hoping to flip the state blue for the first time since 2008. When Hurricane Helene swept through and devastated the city of Asheville and the surrounding towns about one month ago, door-knocking, phone banking, events and even radio ads were immediately suspended for every campaign on every level.
Ads returned almost a week after the storm hit, and the Democratic Party resumed door-knocking when the electricity started to return for most of the area about a week after that — albeit less aggressively.
If it were a normal election run-up in this part of the state, a critical Democratic stronghold, throngs of volunteer canvassers would be already hitting the streets. The lines would be long to pick up maps and knock on doors, not just at the Buncombe HQ but at satellite stations across the county. Before the storm, the door-knocking operation in Asheville was one of the most impressive in the state, according to Kline.
Instead, just about 10 people, most of them inexperienced, showed up to the one single canvassing point on a picture-perfect fall campaigning afternoon. The Democratic Party and the Harris-Walz campaign lost three critical weeks to the storm just as operations were about to scale.
Early voting turnout over the first eight days has reflected this reality.
Fewer registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters had cast a ballot early in person in Buncombe County — down 3 to 4 percentage points — compared to 2020, as of last Thursday, according to an analysis from Chris Cooper, the chair of the public policy institute at Western Carolina University. Meanwhile, early in-person turnout in the rest of the state has been unusually high. Unaffiliated voters make up the majority of registered voters in the county — but most in Buncombe vote for Democrats.
Including mail ballots, the gap widens to roughly 20 percentage points, though Cooper and other analysts caution that it’s difficult to compare mail-in numbers to the COVID-19-shaped 2020 election. Democrats still hold a turnout advantage in Buncombe, but if Harris has any chance of winning the state, turnout in Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, has to outpace 2020, according to one person familiar with campaign planning.
“For us and for North Carolina, the hurricane was our October surprise,” said another person familiar with the campaign.
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Asheville was the largest population area to lose water completely, forcing schools and restaurants to shut for the week and pushing many more people to evacuate to other parts of the state compared to most areas in the surrounding counties.
Watauga, Transylvania and the Republican stronghold of Henderson County are seeing higher in-person Democratic turnout than in 2020, according to Cooper’s analysis. But combined, the number of people who voted for Joe Biden in those three counties is about half the number of people who voted for him in Buncombe.
Of those three, the most Democratic voters live in Henderson County, but two of the small group of Harris Walz staffers who were working there last week had refocused elsewhere, said Mary Hardvall, a county Democratic Party organizer, on Wednesday.
The campaign said that it had reached 10,000 doors in the western part of the state in the last week, 20 members of staff are dedicated specifically to that area and staffers will continue to help arrange community-relief events, dinners and other activities. The Harris campaign says things are picking up as the election draws nearer, with staff in counties throughout the western part of the state, and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz would be campaigning in Charlotte and Asheville this coming Wednesday.
“We’ve had nearly 400 people volunteer with the campaign in the Asheville area over the past two weeks, including launching a canvass with 100 people today,” a campaign spokesperson said.
But one Democratic operative familiar with the planning told NOTUS that “the North Carolina state team has not gotten adequate resources from headquarters.”
With one final week before Election Day, Kline said she was still hopeful: They planned to do as much door-knocking as possible, given the constraints.
“I’m calling an emergency meeting of all of our precinct captains to lay out what we need between now and Election Day, and that is boots on the ground,” she said.
Julie Mayfield, a state House representative whom the Harris campaign recommended NOTUS speak with about turnout, said that she and other local elected officials sent out messages over the last week to encourage canvassing. Those messages dramatically upped the number of people who came to canvass this weekend, she said.
“It’s certainly true that there are people who are still consumed with storm response,” she said, describing friends who are still sleeping only four hours a night as they run response efforts. “But I do think in the end, they will absolutely show up. I have faith in the Democratic voters of Buncombe County.”
Still, Kline’s list of limitations facing Buncombe Democrats in this part of the state is long: There are just not enough volunteers. Those volunteers who are available don’t often want to canvass in unfamiliar areas. Spanish-speaking first and primarily African American neighborhoods are not receiving the door-knocking attention they would if there were more people available. The lines at the polling places are long, making people think that turnout is higher than it is. For those who have left Buncombe, the absentee ballots might be too difficult to be accurately used, requiring two witness signatures and a photocopy of voter ID.
But despite all of those challenges, Kline has faith in the state Democratic Party to be able to push the state blue.
“If it wasn’t for what they were doing there, I’d be way more alarmed,” she said, praising their robust fundraising efforts in the rest of the state. “Because I think for what we might miss, they will compensate and go way beyond.”
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Exactly two weeks before Election Day, the residents of Asheville held a vigil downtown. The surrounding stores and restaurants were shuttered, with “NO WATER” signs taped to the inside of the windows.
This was one of the largest gatherings in weeks, with many local and state political leaders lined up to speak, but no one mentioned the election.
Among the elected officials there was Caleb Rudow, a state representative and the Democratic candidate for Congress in a long-shot bid against incumbent Rep. Chuck Edwards.
“So many things have just been canceled. This is what’s so weird about this election right now, there would normally be a ton of stuff,” he said. “It’s a different, really weird final stretch of the election, and it’s not just for people who are here. I had a bunch of friends who were gonna come from out of town and canvass for the last few weeks, and now they’re probably not.”
There isn’t a complete absence of national politics in this part of the state. Trump showed up to urge early voting, praise local residents and criticize the FEMA response at a press conference last Monday. But the event was only for the press; he did not speak directly to voters.
There are very few campaign signs on the roads or in front of houses. No major surrogate for the Harris campaign has been seen in this part of the state since Helene swept through. Harris herself visited the state directly after the storm in her capacity as vice president, but she hasn’t campaigned in the Asheville area.
“I wasn’t thinking about the election for awhile, but I am today,” Parker Sloan, one of Buncombe’s county commissioners, said after the vigil. “I’m worried that we had to scale back our early voting efforts a little bit as a county, and so many people had evacuated.”
Some of those evacuees were Democrats’ most reliable canvassers. The team has now realized that some are not planning to come back. At least one dedicated volunteer has even relocated to another competitive North Carolina county, Mecklenburg, and is canvassing there instead, Kline said. Others are trickling back now but have missed the early part of the curtailed ramp-up.
Back at the Buncombe HQ last Thursday, a couple of office volunteers were looking for rocks to hold down the canvassing tent, threatening to blow away in the fall wind that usually marks the best time of year for political work in western North Carolina. One woman dumped a big bucket of water into the bushes, cheering that the toilet water they had kept in reserve for flushing was no longer necessary.
As infrastructure slowly improves, people are coming back every day, according to Lindsey Prather, a Democratic state house representative running a competitive race in Buncombe County.
Prather, who spoke with NOTUS after the Harris campaign recommended her insight, also said that turnout has continued to improve over Friday and Saturday, making her optimistic that the numbers are trending in the right direction.
But those who make the effort to knock on doors are still fighting the stress and the complications of the storm.
Bess McDavid, one of the loyal canvassers still grinding it out for the party, said the storm’s toll cannot always be avoided.
On one recent day of canvassing, the door-knocking felt about normal, albeit with fewer people at home. Then she arrived at a house with a hulking piece of machinery resting against the front, the roof misshapen. She climbed around the rusting metal edge to wedge her way up to the door, where Democratic voter Kelsey Nott said she was intending to vote.
“It’s been a nightmare,” Nott said, pointing to the machine that had broken down in the midst of efforts to remove a tree that had fallen on her house. “I’ve been meaning to vote, but honestly there are just so many distractions.”
But things are starting to get better for Nott, she emphasized, swearing to McDavid that she intends to vote when she can find the time. A technician was working to remove the rusting machine that day.
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS. Jasmine Wright, a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this story.