By Glynn Wilson –

With less than four weeks to go before the critical election on Nov. 5, anxiety is off the charts in the United States, especially in hurricane ravaged Florida and North Carolina where Hurricanes Helene and Milton are making it hard for people to even think about voting.

Thousands of weary residents across western North Carolina, many of whom still don’t have water or power, are now confronting a unique question for a battleground state, according to reporting by the New York Times. “What will the last weeks of a divisive and exhausting election look like in such a devastated region?”

The North Carolina State Board of Elections approved emergency measures this week to ensure that voters in the 13 counties affected by the storm could still vote in the election, including allowing local officials to designate alternative polling places. But county elections officials say they face a formidable challenge over the next four weeks as they navigate an intense level of national attention, combined with a beleaguered voter base that may not want to vote anymore, or even know how to vote now.

About 10 early voting sites in western North Carolina had significant damage or accessibility issues, state elections officials are saying. Many local campaigns have been stopped as candidates have been forced to abandon door-knocking and phone banks and instead help their communities dig out of the mud.

“We could care less at this point,” said Kristie Sluder, a Republican running for State Senate in a district that includes liberal Asheville. “All of our priorities have been reset. Local candidates are having to reprioritize their agenda. And honestly, this storm has reset civil priorities.”

Perhaps the only silver lining is that except for the liberal enclave of Asheville, Western North Carolina has been a haven for right-wing extremism and support for Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. If many can’t figure out how to vote, or just don’t bother, that could help Charlotte and the Research Triangle area in Eastern North Carolina carry the state for Vice President Kamala Harris, and the state’s 16 electoral votes could help put her over the top.

Pennsylvania

New polling out Saturday from the Times has some good news for Harris, showing her leading in Pennsylvania by a solid 4 points, and that’s outside the margin of error and without rounding.

“Fueling Ms. Harris in the state is her commanding lead of nearly 20 percentage points when it comes to handling abortion, her single best issue across battleground states and the second most important concern for Pennsylvania voters,” the Times reports.

Both campaigns see Pennsylvania as the most pivotal battleground in this election, and are putting more money, time and energy there than anywhere else, including $350 million in television ads from Harris, Trump and their allies.

Arizona

Donald Trump now holds a 6 point lead in Arizona, however, meaning he will most likely carry that state, while Harris still has a slim chance to take Nevada. Trump is leading 51 percent to 46 percent in Arizona in unrounded figures.

Bolstering Trump’s advantage in Arizona is respondents’ views on the economy. Voters gave Harris a narrow advantages on the same questions in Pennsylvania, where the state’s 19 electoral votes could put her over the top.

Michigan

Some election watchers are now focused on the critical state of Michigan, where the state’s 15 electoral votes could either deliver the election for Harris or swing it to Trump.

Harris currently leads Trump by about 2 points in 538’s presidential polling average of the race, an inversion of where the race stood before Biden dropped out, when Trump was leading by a little over 2 points.

Black voters make up about 13 percent of Michigan’s electorate, and in 2020, 92 percent supported Biden, according to exit polls. But so far in 2024, Harris seems to be running way behind that benchmark. An average of polls conducted in Michigan since Sept. 4 shows the Democratic share of the Black electorate dropping by a precipitous 21 points on margin since 2020.

“That would be a truly seismic shift in Michigan politics, but there are reasons to believe those numbers may not fully materialize come Election Day,” according to the ABC News analysis.

In 2022, national polls estimated a huge drop in Democratic support among Black voters — but the decline ended up being only a couple of points. In Michigan’s governor’s race, the 2022 Democratic share of the Black vote mostly held steady from 2020.

“A 21-point shift on margin among Black voters would be a political earthquake in Michigan,” they say, which is one reason former President Barack Obama has been dispatched to campaign for Harris in Detroit as well as Pittsburg.

Young Voters

Recent polls also show a large drop in Democratic support among young voters, 18- to 29-year-olds, showing a decline of 13 points from 2020. Young voters are key to any Democratic victory, but especially so in Michigan, which had the highest youth turnout in the nation in the 2022 midterms. College students in particular are sure to play a pivotal role in both the presidential election and in key U.S. House races across the state.

While polls sometimes have a hard time capturing a representative sample of young voters, after a year marked by intense student protests over the Biden administration’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas, “Democrats have their work cut out for them to claw back support among the demographic,” analysts say.

Israel

The war in Gaza also has Arab Americans harshly criticizing the Biden administration’s response to the conflict. They make up about 4 percent of the state population (the highest share of any state in the country), and many prominent Arab American leaders in the state have helped galvanize the Uncommitted Movement, which encouraged votes against Biden in the Democratic presidential primary earlier this year. And since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has been dogged by pro-Palestinian activists in Michigan, with protestors interrupting an August rally in Detroit.

In 2020, Arab Americans nationwide leaned heavily toward Democrats. But according to a new national poll conducted by John Zogby Strategies for the Arab American Institute, that advantage isn’t likely to continue this year. Trump and Harris are about tied in the low 40s in the survey of Arab American voters, a far cry from the 24-point advantage that Biden had in 2020.

While support for Trump among the demographic has grown about 7 percent since 2020, much of the change comes from collapsing Democratic support, which has dropped by 18 percent since 2020. Part of that could be because Republican policies on Israel are even less appealing to many anti-war activists than the Democrats’, so many disenchanted Arab American voters may choose to either stay home on Election Day or vote for a third-party candidate rather than mark their ballots for Trump.

Third-party candidates are pulling 12 percent of the vote among Arab Americans nationally in the Zogby poll, much higher than the 3 percent they received among the demographic in 2020.

About the Author

Glynn Wilson is an expert on public opinion as an academic researcher and a journalist. He minored in Political Science with a major in Journalism and Communications at the University of Alabama in an undergraduate BA program back in the early 1980s, where he took every class offered related to this specialty. He also spent some time working with the Capstone Poll in those days, run by Political Science Professor Pat Cotter, and journalism professor Jim Stovall. He covered public opinion for newspapers and the UPI wire service after that for 10 years as part of the beat of covering public affairs and politics, including elections. He then went back to grad school at UA in the mid-1990s. One of his graduate research jobs was to oversee the public opinion lab in the College of Communications, also under the leadership of Stovall and Cotter, who conducted most of the political election polls in Alabama for a couple of decades. Wilson’s academic research specialty was in the area of media effects on public opinion. He later worked toward a Ph.D. in this research, but rather than continue teaching and jump through the final hoop of defending a dissertation at the University of Tennessee, he opted to go back into the news business working for The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times and other publications. He went independent on the web in 2005 in the early blogging era when newspapers were experiencing financial troubles, and has covered public opinion ever since as one of his many specialty beats.

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