As the southeast U.S. continues to recover from the death and destruction brought on by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which struck just two weeks apart, many are wondering: How is this going to affect the election. now less than a month away?
There's two ways to look at it, according to Nathaniel Rakich, Senior Elections Analyst with FiveThirtyEight.
The first, Rakich said, is through persuasion.
"Is this going to change people's votes? And I think it's way too early to tell about that," Rakich told WBEN.
"One way in which it's obviously going to affect elections -- if you think back to Katrina in 2005 -- is if the government is deemed to have a bad response to the disaster, and that hurts their popularity," he added. "That could hurt Kamala Harris because obviously she's part of the sitting administration."
While the next few weeks will tell if Americans find the government's disaster relief response appropriate or not, the second factor at play is much more straightforward: voter turnout in affected areas. In western North Carolina, polling places have been damaged and, in some cases, destroyed.
"In North Carolina, at least, that area is pretty heavily Republican. And so, if infrastructure isn't back in place by Election Day, that could depress turnout and maybe hurt Trump in the state," Rakich said. "But again, I think we need to wait and see how they're able to rebuild over the next three weeks. The former president has continued his strategy of holding rallies on the campaign trail."
Even as the former president keeps busy with rallies, Rakich thinks those are wasted efforts -- because the people attending those rallies already have their minds made up.
"Rallies actually don't matter very much, at least in terms of changing people's minds," he said. "There have been studies of the 2012 and 2016 election looking at where the locations of campaign events and looking at whether that led to an increase in support in that area for the candidate. And there really wasn't any effect."
But there is one big reason we likely won't see Trump pulling back on his rallies.
"One area in which rallies can make a difference, though, is in terms of increasing donations to a candidate. So that's why you see Trump maybe holding these rallies in California and New York, which he's put on his schedule recently, which obviously aren't swing states, but there are still people who can donate money there," Rakich said.
"However, those can also backfire because research has also shown that rallies can also increase donations to your opponent," he added. "So, it can kind of cancel each other out."