CHARLIE HAYSLETT: Now is the time to start planning for the next election-year hurricane

In my younger days as a newspaper reporter covering Georgia politics, politicians and journalists alike would wake up on Election Day and check the weather.

Where was it raining? And was it hard enough or long enough to impact the vote? And who might it help or hurt? Back then, however, nobody ever woke up and worried about whether a hurricane might have an impact on an election.

But that’s been changing over the past few decades. The number of election-season hurricanes has fluctuated over the years, but their intensity seems to be rising steadily. Big Category 4 and even Category 5 storms are now more the norm – and they’ve clearly had an impact on elections – both on candidates and on voters.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s embrace of President Obama may have played a role in sealing Obama’s victory over Christie’s candidate, Republican Mitt Romney.

Twenty years before that, President George H.W. Bush arguably paid a political price when Hurricane Andrew, a highly destructive Category 5 storm, battered south Florida. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response was widely viewed as being too little too late. The elder Bush still carried Florida, but by only 2 points versus his 22-point Sunshine State landslide in 1988 – and he lost the ’92 election to Democrat Bill Clinton.

Hurricane Michael clobbered portions of Georgia in October 2018 and probably had some effect on voting, but Hurricane Helene’s impact will almost certainly prove to be bigger. Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida late on the night of Sept. 26 and then roared north into Georgia passing through more than 50 counties located primarily in southeast Georgia. This was three weeks before early voting was set to begin.

The vast majority of the region hit hardest by Helene was made up of sparsely populated, largely rural counties that have long voted overwhelmingly Republican. When I took a first look at this question during the early voting period, it didn’t seem unreasonable to wonder if the storm might tip Georgia to the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, in a razor-thin race.

That, of course, turned out not to be an issue. Trump carried the state by more than 115,000 votes. But it clearly had an impact. I wrote an initial column on this at the conclusion of Georgia’s early voting period and calculated at the time that the storm had depressed the total early vote by just over 100,000 votes.

My approach was pretty simple. I monitored voter turnout rates in the counties hit the hardest by the storm – those that qualified for “individual assistance” under FEMA’s guidelines – and compared the overall average for those counties with the turnout average for the counties outside the storm’s path. Turnout in those counties was 50.3% versus 44.4% in FEMA’s “individual assistance” counties.

Then I calculated how many votes would have been cast at the higher turnout rate and did the arithmetic to get the difference. Working with final data and making a couple of small tweaks to my original work, I now put the early vote shortfall in the Helene-impacted counties at a little under 92,000. Moreover, voters in those counties closed the gap with a big turnout on Election Day, cutting the overall shortfall to a little over 57,000.

Prior to the election, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his team expressed confidence that Helene would have minimal impact on the election. They had enough time, they felt, to make any adjustments or accommodations that might be needed before voting started.

“The bad part is the storm hit at all,” Gabe Sterling, Raffensperger’s chief operating officer, told WABE News. “The good part is it hit far enough out for us to be able to recover and make plans, so I think most people should be OK.”

“Most people” obviously were “OK,” but, by my math, nearly 60,000 weren’t. This time around, it didn’t make a difference in the outcome. Next time, it might. One thing is clear. Big fall hurricanes are becoming a regular thing, and they come with their own brand of election interference.

Maybe Secretary Raffensperger and his team should start thinking now about how to mitigate the impact of any 2026 storms. Just a suggestion.