North Carolina - sliding into swing status

I've stayed in some pretty dodgy hotels on my travels (including one that a retreating army set fire to, and another that smelled of diesel when you turned the taps on). But I have never before had to sign a form stating that I would not drink the hotel water.

Yet two nights ago, that’s what I was asked to do on checking into a hotel in West Asheville, North Carolina. It's in the western, mountainous end of the state, and was hit hard by Hurricane Helene at the end of September. Very hard.

Ninety-six people were killed by the storm in North Carolina - with 224 killed across the six southeastern states it impacted. In North Carolina, more than three weeks since the deadliest inland hurricane on record, 23 people remain unaccounted for.

Asheville, a nearby city, is built these days on tourism (it used to be a mining town), and this time of the year is normally peak season. Travellers flock here for the gloriously colourful autumnal foliage of the forests, all red gold, green and brown. Local hotels in the city centre charge around $700-$800 a night. But not this year.

The lobby of our hotel is full of men in hi-viz vests and hard hats. At least it is early in the morning and at sunset, around 6.30pm these days. They are the crews working on fallen electricity lines and water pipes. Plenty of others are general contractors engaged in a vast clean up operation.

The water supply is back in the hotel this week, but it's dirty, okay to wash in, but definitely not drinkable. Hence the extra forms to fill: this being the US, the risk of litigation means we have to state we have been told by the front desk. There is no coffee or tea available, except if you brew it yourself in your room with bottled water.

A typically large retail park down the street with the usual array of dining chains - Arby's, Popeye, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Starbucks etc is all but non-operational, because there is no water. Only two places (Cracker Barrel and Applebee’s) are open for dining. Everything is served on disposable plates, with plastic knives and forks - no glasses to drink from, only bottles or cans. The menus are restricted.

Life is far from normal here. So it was no surprise that Donald Trump dropped by.

On Monday, he came to Asheville for a short, sparsely attended event (that tied up all the local police resources and led to road closures). It's his second visit here in three weeks and it is being seen as a sign that he is worried about holding on to North Carolina, a state he won in his previous two presidential elections.

His first visit, days after Hurricane Helene, was widely criticised for telling untruths about Federal funding for the rescue and rehabilitation effort, with Mr Trump falsely claiming the Biden-Harris administration had diverted funding from emergency services to foreign immigrants.

He toned it down this week, still critical of the Federal Government response, but didn't need to lie - the first lot had worked their magic. Criticising the administration's response to the hurricane worked as a booster rocket for the Trump campaign, helping to propel its momentum a nose or two clear of Kamala Harris.

And in this state, that counts as progress, because North Carolina has quietly slipped into the list of states that will decide this election.

At the start of the year, there were half a dozen battleground states. North Carolina is now the seventh swing state.

And with 16 electoral college votes up for grabs, it is second only to the big prize of Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral college votes, all vital in this most closely fought election to take one candidate or the other over the winning line of 270 votes from the electoral college.

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While Donald Trump has turned the hurricane to his advantage by fair means and foul, it is a double-edged blade. He may also lose votes from the hurricanes impact - simply because some Trump voters may not be able to make it to a polling booth by 5 November.

There are nearly 500 roads closed in this state due to the hurricane, some washed away, some covered by landslides, some with bridges swept away. In some communities, most of the buildings are gone, their residents scattered across the state and beyond. In others, the houses are so waterlogged or unsafe that people are living in tents in their own gardens, determined to protect their property.

And for others... well, nobody is too sure. The phones are out in quite a few places, both landlines and mobile signals, the towers swept away by floods or landslips.

McDowell County voted 73% for Trump in 2020. The state overall voted 49.9% for the sitting president, 48.8% for his challenger, Joe Biden. McDowell is one of the most Republican of the counties in the state. But the town of Old Fort there is not doing what most other communities in North Carolina have been doing since last Thursday - early in-person voting.

We met Laura Valdez as she hung out some washing outside her pale blue wooden bungalow, just in front of her mud-soaked pale blue minivan. By a miracle her house did not flood, but all around her home was a vision of devastation caused by flooding - first 15cm, then several metres. Then came the text messages warning that a dam upstream had broken, and they ran to a neighbour with a two-storey brick house, with Rico, her one-year-old baby in her arms.

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She is determined to vote on 5 November, but won't who for, as she's still awaiting clear instruction from The Lord.

"I figured out who I want to vote for, but I haven't fully gotten an answer from the Lord. I have a pretty good idea of how that's going to go, but I pray about it every day leading up to (voting day) and I pray the morning of right before. Then, I say what do you want me to do? And I have yet to have a time I don't get an answer."

But nothing will keep her from voting.

"I am voting one way or the other. I'm voting if I have to show up at the place where they do the ballot - I think they call it the board of elections. If I have to drive to Marion in order to vote, I will do so. I have a responsibility as not just an American citizen, but I have a responsibility as a Christian to do so. And my personal opinion is, if you don't vote, you don't have a right to complain".

Her elderly neighbour Donna Noonan came by, driven by one of her friends, Katri Wilson, who had befriended her in hospital at the start of the year. When Donna’s mobile home was ripped from its foundations by the flood, Katri had come by to rescue Donna, her husband and their seven cats.

Donna told me she was voting for Donald Trump.

"Because I think he's a good man", she said. In particular, she was impressed with his visits to the area after the storm.

"He's been here. He was here yesterday. He was right up the mountain in Swannanoa. He's been on ground. Other people up there in Washington have not been on ground. They have flown over just gawking - having a look. He's had his feet on these grounds and has seen the devastation and the destruction and the people that survived", she said, her voice cracking with emotion.

"And I think he's got a good heart, and I think this is what our country needs back is a man with integrity and a good heart."

Katri used to live in California and is used to evacuating her home because of forest fires. But what has impressed her about North Carolina since moving here is the sense of a community that helps each other out in the face of adversity like this. She too is voting for Donald Trump and is also impressed by his trips to Asheville.

"Boots on the ground. He was here. He's a different duck, I'll give him that. But you know what? When it comes to looking out for people, I think that's his priorities. He wants American people to be healthy and happy. You know, he cares a lot. He showed that. I wasn't sure how he was going to respond, but he did. He responded by getting here".

Laura and Donna’s normal early voting station is in Old Fort Methodist Church two blocks away. But it was severely damaged by the flood.

Pastor Charlie Collins (yes, his forebears left Ireland seven generations ago), has driven two-and-a-half hours from his home with other volunteers to help, bringing supplies and donated clothing for those who have lost everything.

But inside the church, where voting machines and voting booths and administrators would normally be at work, his volunteers have had to rip out the innards of the building. Mud filled the place thigh deep, with water on top of that. The doors still show the high tide mark and the floorboards are gone, as the mud had filled the substructure too.

If you want to vote early in this town, you have to drive 20 minutes to the outskirts of the county town of Marion, where a solo early voting centre is in operation. And on Monday it set a new record, according to Deputy Director of the County electoral commission Jane Propst.

"We voted 1,528 voters here at this location yesterday. This is our only location. We normally vote around 1,000 a day".

"It's really busy here today," I said.

"It's been a little slower than it seems to be in the past three days," Jane replied.

"I think it'll pick up more next week, but today's been, it's been a busy day here, but not like the past three days". Why, I wondered? "I just think everybody wants to vote. I just think they want to make their voice heard," Jane replied.

Trade was brisk inside the voting centre, which itself narrowly avoided the flooding that hit the Mexican restaurant next door. By mid-afternoon yesterday they had recorded 6,019 votes from the county’s 35,000 registered voter total since early voting opened last Thursday.

A strong turnout in this area should be good news for Trump. But he really does need a good turnout to retain the state. The joker in the pack in the North Carolina election has been Hurricane Helene, which has left a lot of his voters facing an arduous trek to cast their ballot. But buoyed up by Trump's visits, the enthusiasm seems to be there among the hard-hit residents of western North Carolina.

The other variable adding to the nerves in the Trump camp is the 250,000 Republicans who voted for Nikki Hales in the Republican Primary earlier this year. Considering Trump only beat Biden by 75,000 votes in 2020, that's a lot of loose voters on the Republican side. Abstentions or crossovers from those former Haley-voting Republicans could spell trouble for Trump.

For Kamala Harris, another frequent visitor to the state, the focus is on the big cities of Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte and Greensboro.

North Carolina has undergone very rapid economic and population growth over the past quarter of a century, with a lot of that growth happening in the urban areas.

These tend to vote more Democratic, according to Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics at Catawba College.

He told Politico last weekend that Harris needs to maximise voter turnout in these urban areas if she is to stand a chance of flipping a state that has only voted for a democratic president once since 1976.

We called into the early voting centre in Guilford County’s impressive headquarters in the middle of Greensboro. All the people we spoke to on their way out said they had voted for Harris.

"I voted for Kamala Harris because she's wonderful", said Diane Schote. "She's women's rights. We fought for women's rights in the 1970s when I was young, and they're taking it all away from us, and that is the main reason that I am voting - to get our rights back."

Her husband Richard said he voted for Harris too. "I don't think she was the best choice the Democrats could have had, but she's the only choice, and Donald Trump is such a crook and a loser, I could not vote for him under any circumstances."

Both the Schotes and another couple, Sonia and Richard Honey, told me they were also voting for the Democratic candidate for Governor, Josh Stein.

The Republican candidate, Mark Robinson - endorsed by Trump - has become mired in a scandal over a decade-old post on a porn forum in which he called himself "a black Nazi", and expressed a wish to own slaves. Subsequent polling suggests the posts will cost him the race for the governorship.

"I think that it would be great for us as the state to do the right thing, so we can hold our head up high if that makes any sense. But you know, with the hurricane going on, we have a lot of people that are displaced and have issues, and they're dealing with all that, so I don't know. I don't know. I hope that, out of the 100 counties in North Carolina we picked the right person for the job," said Sonia Honey.

But her husband says historically the state votes for a Democratic governor and a Republican President.

How will it go this year?

The polls say it's too close to call. It's yet another state where every vote counts and all kinds of efforts are being made to get those votes out for 5 November.