Campaigning in a Hurricane

Today’s notice: Running GOTV while recovering from a hurricane, running for Congress while openly transgender, running for Senate with fewer ticket splitters, running a tech company in 2025.

The Political HurricaneHurricane Helene has left a historic trail of death and destruction in its wake, a natural disaster millions of Americans will be recovering from for years. And for the next month, there’s an additional challenge: running an election in storm-hit swing states at a moment when electioneering is hardly a priority and voting could prove difficult.

NOTUS’ Anna Kramer has been closely following the political impacts of Helene on western North Carolina, a section of the state where Democrats rely on the denser, bluer Asheville to offset the deep red counties surrounding it. The GOP, meanwhile, needs all the votes it can get in a state where a mess of a gubernatorial nominee might have depressed enthusiasm well before Helene made landfall.

The realities on the ground, from Anna and NOTUS’ Calen Razor:

• Polling: One GOP strategist said that “they will not trust any polls coming out of the state for the next several weeks” due to Helene’s impact on North Carolina. Polls, of course, are not just for forecasting models and “!!!” tweets, they are among the most critical components of campaign messaging and resource deployment. Information is now unreliable, say pollsters, and the solution to that problem is unclear. “I just don’t have anything solid to draw on,” the director of polling at Meredith College said.

• GOTV: North Carolina starts early voting on Oct. 17. The campaign operations in Helene-affected areas remain too wrecked to match the complex and expensive GOTV efforts planned before the disaster hit. The chair of the Democratic Party in the county, which includes Asheville, has evacuated to Charlotte so she can get the power and internet access she needs to stay in touch with the state party. Her volunteers back home (including her doctor spouse) have been released to relief efforts for the time being. The same goes for the state GOP’s Trump Force 47 GOTV volunteers. “First and foremost, you have friends and family and neighbors that are hurting and need help,” the state GOP chair said. “But you know, the calendar is what it is too.”

• Infrastructure: Even if there were volunteers to do the GOTV, there may not be sites where voters can cast their ballots. An official in GOP-leaning Henderson County said many early vote sites there were rendered inaccessible by Helene. Now, voting professionals are hoping the state government will make emergency changes to the law. Details on that could come as early as today.

• Public Trust: Sadly and predictably, Helene has become the latest fodder for concentrated misinformation designed to shift votes. Donald Trump and his allies in right-wing media have made up stories about disaster-response efforts. Weather-control conspiracies from Marjorie Taylor Greene draw some GOP pushback, but as we saw with Springfield, Ohio, for the most part, formerly-known-as-outrageous stuff like this is either allowed to fester or pushed further along by the Trump campaign. What’s more, GOP “Election Integrity” operations are well underway in North Carolina, a catchall term for lawsuits that challenge the legitimacy of votes and seek to purge voters from the rolls. Emergency rules may be a confusing new layer to the process, likely resulting in even more legal efforts to make it harder to vote.

Read Anna’s coverage here.

Sarah McBride Is Ready for Congress. But Is Congress Ready for Her?

Sarah McBride’s near-certain January swearing-in as the first openly transgender member of Congress will be a glass-ceiling-shattering moment.

Yet McBride told NOTUS’ Oriana González she knows she might not receive an entirely warm welcome in Congress. “There’s no question that this moment, frankly like so much of American history, is a dual story of progress and pain,” she said.

As excited as LGBTQ+ lawmakers are for her arrival on Capitol Hill, they are also bracing for the uncomfortable reality that plenty of GOP lawmakers are less than thrilled. Some are championing bills that would keep McBride and other trans people out of women’s bathrooms and ban gender-affirming care.

“We fully expect that to continue,” Rep. Becca Balint, co-chair of the Equality Caucus, told Oriana.

Anti-trans rhetoric is so rampant among some GOP circles that Hakeem Jeffries has privately acknowledged McBride’s security will need to be addressed, per a source familiar. The Equality Caucus has already started having meetings with Democrats to talk about trans issues in preparation for her arrival. Speaker Mike Johnson’s office did not respond to a comment request.

“It’s the power of our presence that combats the mischaracterizations and the demonization that we see of a community that’s in the crosshairs of right-wing attacks,” McBride said. “That is how you actually more effectively combat these attacks.”

Read the story here.

Front Page

• Sen. Eric Schmitt Is Already Eyeing the NRSC Chair Bid: The freshman senator has staff already putting out “feelers.”
• National Republicans Don’t Blink Anymore at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ‘Weather’ Conspiracies: Local Republican officials are begging the national party to step in.
• Election Integrity Disputes Hang Over North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene Recovery: Republicans are pursuing cases over voter registration and absentee ballots.

The New Black Outreach by Democrats

Tinashe has a close look at what Democrats say they’ve learned about Black outreach as the campaign rolls into its final days. “The Black church has become stale,” a person close to Kamala Harris’ campaign told her. “It has to do that much more for Kamala Harris to be successful. It’s no longer the epicenter for political change that it once was in my father’s generation.”

The “souls to the polls” engine still works for older generations. But when it comes to the younger Black vote — where polling has shown Trump making some inroads — the Harris team has emphasized social media and “more creative places, such as music festivals, sporting events and bars.”

Read the story here.

Tammy Baldwin’s Trump Problem

Tammy Baldwin won her 2018 Senate bid by a resounding 11 points, but as she jockeys to keep her seat against businessman Eric Hovde, the polls just aren’t that strong.

Though a recent Marquette Law poll had Baldwin up 7 points, a Cook Political poll last week had Baldwin up by just 2 points. Axios also reported that internal Democratic polling has Baldwin up just 2 points.

So what gives? NOTUS’ Nuha Dolby found one answer: The vanishing Trump-Tammy voter.

Baldwin — a liberal, reliable vote for the Democratic Party — can’t claim to be an ally on the MAGA issues that animate Trump’s base. Baldwin recently told The New York Times she believes there will be ticket splitters out there, anyway. But in Baldwin’s first time sharing a ballot with Trump, the odds voters will break for Tammy and Trump may be slipping away.

“Fewer Republicans are defecting from Trump at the presidential level, but there are also fewer defecting from the Republicans at the Senate level,” Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told Nuha.

Read the story here.

Quotable: Is Harris the Friend Silicon Valley Is Waiting For?

“I think as a senator, she was seen as having an open door and keeping an open mind,” said Adam Kovacevich, the CEO and founder of the Chamber of Progress, a progressive technology industry group. “That’s huge.”

Harris has kept her cards close about her tech policy agenda, but NOTUS’ Byron Tau and Claire Heddles dug through her record and caught up with her former staff for clues. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley is reading the tea leaves and thinks they see an ally.

“The biggest thing I see is she has not made attacks on business a core part of her identity,” Kovacevich said. “When she has talked about tech, it has largely been around consumer protection, fraud, scams and fairness.”

Week Ahead

• The Supreme Court officially begins its new term on Monday.
• Trump will participate in a memorial event on Monday remembering victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
• Trump and Harris will participate in town halls with undecided Latino voters on Univision and ViX.
  
  • Trump will answer questions in Miami on Tuesday.
  • Harris will answer hers in Vegas on Thursday.
• Harris will pop up across media this week, from “60 Minutes” on Monday to appearances later in the week on “The View” and Howard Stern’s satellite radio show.
• Joe Biden will travel to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to discuss his administration’s progress replacing lead pipes on Tuesday.
• Doug Emhoff has a packed day in Arizona on Tuesday. First, he will stump for Harris at a Get Out the Vote campaign rally. Then he will deliver remarks at a Republicans for Harris organizing event. And he will also speak at a campaign reception.
• Barack Obama will stump for Harris in Pennsylvania on Thursday.

Not Us

We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by … not us.

• A superintendent in Oklahoma doesn’t just want to buy more Bibles for schools, according to Oklahoma Watch. He wants a specific Bible, endorsed by Donald Trump, to be on classrooms’ bookshelves.
• The Washington Post asked Trump rally attendees why they leave his rallies early. Some had a simple answer: They have work the next day.
• Politico noted that Larry Hogan is testing the limits of how far and fast he can run away from Trump. This strategy, so far, hasn’t delivered the results he needs.
• Tim Walz repeatedly minimized or dismissed fraud scandals in his state, a CNN investigation found.
• Joe Biden is ending his presidency on a quiet note, Axios reports.

Be Social

Joe Biden had all the jokes at the end of his surprise appearance in the briefing room.

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