WATCH LIVE: Trump delivers speech after surveying damage from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina

RUTHERFORDTON, N.C. – Renee Kyro has voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump for the third time in a row. But she plans to volunteer for the first time, reaching out to her neighbors in hurricane-stricken western North Carolina to make sure they have a voting plan amid the flurry of redistricting changes.

Former President Donald Trump is expected to deliver a speech today at 12 p.m. ET. Watch his remarks in the player above.

“I want to say that I’m confident he’ll win, but I’m worried that people are just overwhelmed and maybe need some help or encouragement,” she said as she stood outside an early voting site in the conservative stronghold Rutherford County stood. “I just can’t imagine Kamala Harris as president.”

READ MORE: The number of early voters in North Carolina still recovering from Helene is larger than in 2020

To the east, in heavily Democratic Winston-Salem, Dia Roberts described the fear that drives her to write postcards urging voters to support Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee.

“Donald Trump is a narcissist, a liar, a would-be dictator,” said Roberts, an independent who voted for Democrats in the Trump era. “That shouldn’t even be close.”

But it is like that.

And North Carolina’s presidential race comes in the wake of Hurricane Helene and parallel to a governor’s race in which the Trump-backed GOP candidate, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, saw his campaign collapse amid numerous controversies, potentially damaging unity could weaken the GOP.

Both Harris and Trump campaigns are ramping up their activities here again after the storm. Trump has three stops in North Carolina on Monday, including a visit to view storm damage in Asheville. Former President Bill Clinton appeared last week with Harris’ Vice President Tim Walz and then made several visits to eastern North Carolina.

With just 15 days until Election Day, North Carolina is crucial to the Electoral College calculations that will determine whether Trump gets an encore in the White House or Harris hands him a second defeat, becoming the first woman, second black person, etc . History makes first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office.

“We will win or lose the presidency depending on what happens in North Carolina,” Republican national chairman Michael Whatley, a North Carolinian, said last week as part of a GOP bus tour.

Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes have received more attention from Harris and Trump than other battlegrounds. But North Carolina and Georgia are the second-largest swing states, with 16 electoral votes each. While Georgia produced Democrat Joe Biden’s narrowest margin of victory four years ago, it was North Carolina that delivered Trump’s narrowest victory: fewer than 75,000 votes and 1.3 percentage points.

North Carolina is expected to cast up to 5.5 million ballots, with more than 1 million votes already cast since early voting began last Thursday.

Harris targeted the suburbs of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on Monday, holding a series of conversations with Republican Liz Cheney moderated by Bulwark publisher and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.

Hurricane Helene displaced thousands of voters

Many counties in North Carolina affected by Hurricane Helene have moved their voting precincts or changed early voting locations. Thousands of voters remained displaced or without power or water as early voting began.

Buncombe County, home of left-leaning Asheville, was hit hard. The University of North Carolina Asheville campus remained closed as of Monday. Appalachian State University in Boone, the Mountain Region’s other Democratic vote bank, just resumed some in-person classes. But surrounding western counties, including Rutherford, bring in more GOP votes overall than the Democrats’ advantages in Asheville and Boone. This means that both parties have to struggle with verifying voter turnout and their calculations.

“We work on all kinds of channels, you know,” Whatley said. “We’ll talk on the phone. We will do direct mail. We’ll send out emails and digital messages – basically anything we can do to tell people where to go.”

Watch the segment in the player above.

Republicans like Kryo, who lives a short drive from the devastated community of Chimney Rock, said she knows “many Trump supporters who have lost everything” and others who remain in their homes but do not have reliable internet or phone connections and their homes may not know polling station.

“I go door to door when I have to,” she said.

Still, Trump and Republicans never built the same campaign infrastructure that Harris did — or that of President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race in July.

“It was a coin toss before the storm,” said Republican pollster Paul Shumaker. “The key question will be: How will rural turnout compare to urban and suburban turnout?” Particularly, Shumaker added, if Republicans “continue to lose votes in urban and suburban areas.”

State Sen. Natalie Murdock, who doubles as political director for the state’s coordinated Democratic campaign, said the party has the resources to reach its target audience in the disaster zone. Field workers in some of the Democrats’ more than two dozen offices across the state have been involved in recovery efforts, distributing water and other supplies to residents. Murdock noted that Appalachian State is expected to be fully operational before Election Day and students will be able to vote in their usual campus precinct. Democratic aides said UNC Asheville students will be contacted and encouraged to cast absentee ballots if they cannot vote in person.

The Democrats are running for both Helene and Mark Robinson

Even before Helene, North Carolina was all the more compelling because it had split-ticket voting in the past. It is one of the few states where gubernatorial contests run parallel to the presidential election. Democrats have won the presidential election only once since 1992 (Barack Obama’s narrow victory in 2008). Republicans have won only one governor’s race during the same period. Four years ago, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper won re-election by 4.5 points, even as Trump trailed Biden. It is now temporary.

Democrats hope Robinson’s recent battles, centered on CNN’s revelations that the state’s first black lieutenant governor once called himself a “black Nazi” and posted lascivious statements on a porn website, will draw thousands of Cooper-Trump Voters are turning stone into supporters of Harris and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh. Robinson has denied the allegations and sued CNN, calling the report defamatory.

In his campaign appearances last week, Walz made sure to make two things clear to any swing-state audience that went beyond the usual: he expressed condolences and promised continued federal support for the Helene victims, and he declared that Robinson “never was governor.” of North Carolina.”

Murdock said: “We are definitely making it clear how extreme the Republican ticket is.”

At least Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party has moved some of the state toward Harris, said Robert Brown, a High Point attorney who wanted to hear from Walz. Just 16 years ago, Brown was on the other side of the aisle as Republican candidate John McCain’s anti-Obama state director.

Trump’s nomination in 2016, Brown said, prompted him to register as an independent and vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. “After Jan. 6, I moved all the way over” and registered as a Democrat, he said.

“I am becoming more and more afraid and disillusioned about the direction of the party and the country,” he said, adding that he sees Harris as a center-left pragmatist who is as committed to national security as McCain . “For me and some other Republicans and former Republicans, it’s really not that hard.”

Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.