Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
Image CreditBreccan F. Thies / The Federalist
Amid the death and destruction Hurricane Helene wrought in western North Carolina, voters in the emergency-declaration region showed up to help carry the state for President-Elect Donald Trump, outdoing their performance in 2020.
Americans watched aghast as slow-rolled responses from Democrat leaders, including from the Biden-Harris Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), appeared to be negligent and had many wondering if state and federal leadership were trying to suppress the vote from the deep-red region of North Carolina.
By Election Day, some western North Carolinians were still without power, water, roads and bridges, and a normal school schedule, but voters there not only outperformed themselves compared to 2020, they also beat the 2024 statewide rate at which ballots were cast.
“North Carolina voters, particularly in our western counties, overcame the challenges brought by Hurricane Helene to deliver a resounding victory for President Trump,” Jim Womack, president of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT), told The Federalist. “Without them, he couldn’t have won, and with them, he won by approximately the same margin he did in 2016.”
According to The Federalist’s analysis of unofficial vote totals from the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE), just over 616,000 voters from the 28 counties and Indian reservation areas in the emergency-declaration zone cast ballots for Trump, providing a net of nearly 250,000 votes to his statewide voter total, which he won by about 190,000 votes.
In 2020, the region delivered 604,119 votes for Trump, and a net 247,217 votes, contributing to Trump’s roughly 75,000-vote win in the state.
While the unofficial statewide rate at which voters cast ballots was 73.10 percent, according to the NCSBE numbers, the regional rate was 75.90 percent. However, voter participation in the region is less than it was in 2020 (77.31 percent), suggesting Helene may have had some effect on the vote totals. Those in the region who voted for Trump accounted for about 11 percent of all voters statewide and 21 percent of the state’s Trump voters.
“I’m not surprised. That region of NC was founded with a fierce independent Scottish spirit that remains there today,” Jay DeLancy, executive director of Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, told The Federalist. “These are tough people who never sit around, waiting for somebody else to solve their problems.”
Hurricane destruction in the region made some voting locations unusable, leading the NCSBE and county boards of election to develop contingency plans and find new locations so that voters could get to the polls.
While many of those plans came after criticism about hurricane response generally, Democrats in control of local elections boards in Henderson and McDowell counties still stood in the way of opening more locations where those in the region could cast their ballots. Those counties’ obstinance provoked intervention from the state legislature, which compelled them to open more polling sites.
For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.