Hello, and welcome to our special Election Day edition of State of Emergency. I’m Zoya Teirstein, and today I’m reporting from rainy Buncombe County, North Carolina. I spent the morning talking to voters at the Fairview Public Library — one of 17 temporary polling sites in the county established after Hurricane Helene caused widespread damage in late September.
North Carolina is one of many states that saw record-breaking early voting in the weeks leading up to Election Day — about 50 percent of registered voters in Buncombe, more than 115,000 people, voted early, and local election officials expect a huge turnout today as well.
“The last four years have been brutal for small business. You come out of the grocery store with a couple bags and it costs you $140 and you’re going, ‘What did I get? I got taken is what I got.’”
—Robert Lund, a home remodeler in his 50s, who said he was going to vote for Donald Trump.
Polls opened at 6:30 a.m. at Fairview Public Library, with dozens of people streaming in throughout the morning. While most are in the right place, a few voters have accidentally landed in the wrong spot. “This isn’t my location,” one man called to me as he got back into his truck.
Sean Miller, a 26-year-old Democrat who lives in Fairview, lost nearly all of her worldly possessions in Helene, and the road leading out of her community was destroyed. “We were trapped for a week,” she said, stopping to talk to me after she cast her ballot. “And there was a tree in my house.” Miller was able to find her new polling location online once her power came back on.
The storm didn’t change who she planned to vote for, Miller said, but it did deepen her conviction. “I would really like to be able to keep the National Weather Service free and accessible to everyone,” she said, referencing a Project 2025 initiative to privatize federal weather data collection. “Helene didn’t change my opinion, but it made me feel more encouraged to vote to keep basic things like that.”
A sign at the Fairview Public Library polling location in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
Zoya Teirstein / Grist
Robert Lund, a home remodeler in his 50s, said he was initially concerned that the hurricane would affect his ability to vote, but he soon received information about this new polling location from the county. But like Miller, one thing the storm didn’t change was Lund’s politics. “The last four years have been brutal for small business,” he said on his way into the library. “You come out of the grocery store with a couple bags and it costs you $140 and you’re going, ‘What did I get? I got taken is what I got.’” Lund said he was going to vote for Donald Trump.
Joining me out in the field today are my colleagues Katie Myers, Grist’s reporter embedded at Blue Ridge Public Radio in western North Carolina, and Ayurella Horn-Muller, who is reporting from Florida in communities devastated by both Helene and Hurricane Milton. Check back with Grist later today for our Election Day dispatches on how voters are feeling post-hurricane and the hurdles they’ve faced while trying to vote in the wake of a disaster.
A vulnerable Republican stakes his seat on water
Hi everyone, this is Jake. I’m on the opposite side of the country from Zoya, in California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley, but extreme weather is affecting a critical election on this coast as well. This morning at Grist, I profiled David Valadao, a longtime congressman representing California’s 22nd District and one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House of Representatives, where the GOP has a razor-thin margin of control. Valadao is a former dairy farmer who has staked his political career on support for policies that provide more water for the agricultural industry — even when that means dismissing environmental rules. Valadao’s district has suffered historic drought in the decade since he entered Congress, and local farmers are once again staunchly supporting him this election cycle.
“Whoever’s perceived as being more likely to protect agriculture, or secure existing water deliveries and identify new ones, is going to be rewarded at the ballot box.”
—Tal Eslick, political consultant and former staffer to David Valadao
But the Central Valley is also home to numerous rural communities that don’t have reliable access to clean drinking water, and groups supporting his Democratic opponent, Rudy Salas, are trying to rally these low-income Hispanic communities to vote Valadao out. They’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors in a district that elected Valadao by just over 3,000 votes last time around. The complex tangle of California water politics rarely makes national headlines, but this year it could decide who ends up in control of Congress.
Read my full story on Valadao here.
What we’re reading
Are climate voters showing up?: The presidential election will likely come down to a few thousand votes in critical battleground states like Georgia. Our Grist colleagues Kate Yoder and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey look at the up-to-the-wire effort by advocacy groups and campaign volunteers to contact registered voters who care about climate change but seldom show up at the polls, urging them to cast their ballots this week. 
Read more
Big downballot energy races: Just 200 public officials have outsize control over the fate of the nation’s clean energy transition — and many of them are on your ballot this November. Grist reporters Emily Jones and Gautama Mehta present a rundown on the role that state public service commissions play in regulating utilities, and the critical political races voters are deciding this year that could affect clean power deployment.Read more
What the election means for plastic: The United States is one of the world’s top producers of plastic, and the next president could play a make-or-break role in addressing this crisis, according to my Grist colleague Joseph Winters. It will be up to the next administration to decide whether to push for limits on plastic production, as Biden promised to do, or to renege on that commitment and let the industry produce as much as it wants.Read more
Rafael approaches: A tropical storm system called Rafael is forming in the Caribbean Sea and may become a hurricane by later today, Election Day. The storm won’t disrupt the voting process, but it will likely make landfall somewhere around Louisiana this weekend, presenting the lame-duck Biden administration with yet another disaster challenge.Read more
Fury over floods in Spain: Protestors hurled mud at the king and queen of Spain over the weekend during their royal visit to the site of unprecedented flooding in the Valencia region. The disaster killed more than 200 people and sparked outrage from residents, who accused the government of waiting too long to send out emergency alerts.Read more
