PLAINS, Ga. — Signs that read “Happy 100th Birthday Mr. President!” dot lawns. The local general store is stocking up on its famous peanut butter ice cream. And the population of this tiny southwestern Georgia town is expected to double for a day.

Jimmy Carter turns 100 Tuesday, and his hometown is pulling out all the stops to celebrate the milestone — even if the former president himself isn’t expected to be attending.

The birthday bash for the first U.S. president to reach 100 will include a military jet flyover, a naturalization ceremony and a concert. Carter, who is in hospice care, has not attended a major event since his wife’s memorial in November 2023.

Throughout Plains, locals are excited to honor the man they know simply as “Mr. Jimmy.” Many residents here have stories about running into Carter at the pharmacy or the peanut shop that sells the flavor of ice cream he enjoys. And even though Plains leans Republican, some houses with yard signs supporting former president Donald Trump also have signs commemorating Carter.

“Everybody in this town is crazy about him,” said Sonya Fox, who works at a medical clinic that Carter helped to establish in the town. “There wasn’t a doubt in our mind that he would make it.”

Jill Stuckey, the superintendent of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park here in Plains, visits with Carter almost daily and said the former president is in an upbeat mood but fairly nonchalant about his birthday.

“I ask him how it feels being 100, and I really get no reaction,” said Stuckey, adding that Carter often just shrugs his shoulders. “But what he is really interested in is what we are doing to help people around town, or how some of his friends are.”

Carter has never been one for huge birthday bashes. He spent his 52nd campaigning and his 55th, as president, drinking white wine at a D.C. steakhouse with his wife and a few friends. After he lost reelection at 56, Carter returned to the tiny south Georgia town where he was born in 1924. Friends said he’s mostly opted for low-key celebrations ever since.

Boze Godwin, who served as the town’s mayor for 40 years before retiring in January, threw a few lowcountry-boil birthday parties for Carter, and once, when Carter wanted homemade peach ice cream, Godwin drove four hours each way to Steinhatchee, Fla., to buy a gallon.

The only fancy celebration Godwin remembers Carter ever having was his 75th. He commemorated that one with a gala and a fundraiser to restore the Rylander Theatre in Americus, Ga. Pat Boone and the Indigo Girls performed, and Carter cut his birthday cake with a saber he earned at the Naval Academy.

Statistically, Americans have a less than 1 percent chance of living to 100. When Carter took office, just one president, John Adams, had lived to be 90. Since then, Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush have all reached at least 93, but none has lived as long as Carter.

Carter has faced particularly significant challenges over the past decade. In 2015, he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, a usually fatal skin cancer that spread to his liver and brain. He has suffered a number of falls in recent years, and in February 2023, he entered hospice care.

Because his health has been so bad, Plains residents didn’t expect him to show up last October when they celebrated his 99th birthday at the annual peanut festival. Most people were watching the parade when a black Chevy Suburban driven by a Secret Service agent suddenly turned onto Main Street. The crowd gasped and cheered as they realized Carter was in the back seat, wearing an Atlanta Braves ball cap and holding hands with Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years.

Carter was frail then, and family members have said his health has slipped further since Rosalynn died at 96 last November, a month and a half after their birthday ride. He has now been in hospice for nearly 19 months. He needs a wheelchair to get around, and Carter can no longer read or write, Stuckey said, but still watches television sitcoms and news programs.

Carter did not attend this year’s peanut festival, which was on Saturday. He was last spotted out locally around the Fourth of July, when Stuckey said he went to see a fireworks display in a neighboring community.

Nonetheless, his neighbors in Plains have been planning for his 100th celebration for the past year. The military flyover includes four F-18 Jets, which Carter had authorized to build when he was president. The community concert will include performances by country musician Brent Cobb and pianist David Osbourne, who has been playing before the Carters for three decades.

Tickets to the events sold out within a few days. The building where the festivities will take place holds about 300 people — roughly enough spots for only half the town, Stuckey said, and everyone wanted a chance to mark history.

“There’s never been a president to live to 100,” Stuckey said. “It’s very humbling and a great moment in history that we get to have a front-row seat to.”

Family members have said Carter is more interested in the state of the country than he is his own birthday. James Earl “Chip” Carter III told The Washington Post in early September that his father spent days watching the speeches from the Democratic National Convention.

When Chip Carter told his father that many people believe he is trying to stay alive to reach his birthday, the former president pushed back: “He said he didn’t care about that. It’s just a birthday. He said he cared about voting for Kamala Harris.”

Carter’s state of Georgia is critical to the November election. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 by less than 1 percent of the vote in the state, and Carter’s family said he can’t wait to cast his mail-in ballot for Harris, the Democratic nominee.

Few cities in America have had such a close-knit relationship with a president as Carter has had with Plains.

In his memoir, “An Hour Before Daylight,” Carter wrote about growing up in a one-story farmhouse on the edge of Plains, just a few generations after the end of slavery, when White and Black Georgians were still figuring out how to live together and rely on one another.

Carter’s family grew peanuts and cotton and struggled, with the help of Black farm hands and neighbors, to make it through the Great Depression. His childhood on the farm left an indelible mark.

“My most persistent impression as a farm boy was of the earth,” Carter wrote. “There was a closeness, almost an immersion, in the sand, loam and red clay that seemed natural and constant.”

After Carter married Rosalynn, the couple built a house in Plains in 1961. They have lived there ever since, except for Carter’s stints in the governor’s mansion in Atlanta and his time in the White House. The home is also from where they launched much of their humanitarian work.

Today, Plains has a population of just 720 residents. Most of the town’s main attractions involve the Carters. The city has commemorated both Jimmy and Rosalynn’s childhood homes. The old train depot where he headquartered his presidential campaign is now a museum. Sixty-five thousand tourists visit the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park each year.

The town’s main drag is home to Bobby Salter’s Plain Peanuts and General Store, which is located in a warehouse once owned by Carter’s family. It sells one of Carter’s favorite treats — peanut butter ice cream.

Most of the shop owners in Plains know the former president personally.

“No one thought we would actually reach this point, but now that we have reached this point, it’s pretty exciting,” said Philip Kurland, owner of the political memorabilia shop Plains Trading Post. “It’s exciting, but it’s sad. The sad part is they don’t come into the stores anymore and they are not as involved.”

Many here aren’t surprised that Carter made it to 100. And they note his longevity isn’t by accident. Even from a young age, Carter’s mother, Lillian, who was a nurse, instilled in him the value of good nutrition. Throughout much of his life, Carter was also an avid runner. In his later years, he had a swimming pool installed at his house so he could keep exercising.

“But both he and Rosalynn ate right, every single meal. They exercised every single day and made it a priority,” Stuckey said. “They were just regimented in their health ethic because they wanted to live as long as they possibly could to help as many people as they possibly could.”

In the lead-up to Tuesday’s celebrations, many from near and far were reflecting on Carter’s legacy. Many Black residents recalled how Carter helped rebuild what they refer to as “the projects,” where many low-income Plains residents reside.

Stanley Lockhart, who is Black and became paralyzed after a swimming accident 15 years ago, said he has so much admiration for Carter that he would always try to say hello to him. Lockhart would lift his elbow just high enough to signal a wave.

“If I see him, I wave to him and he would wave back,” said Lockhart, 52. “He did a lot of good stuff for us and he was a good man.”

Others were reflecting on how his life and career crossed political lines that now feel etched in stone.

“He brought people together instead of dividing them, unlike some people we know,” said Paula Riley, 64, who lives in Randolph County, Ga., and took her family on a tour of Carter’s boyhood home on Monday.

April Kirkman, 67, traveled to Plains from California with her guitar and a song she wrote for the former president. The song is titled, “I Wanna Be a Jimmy Carter Kinda Christian.” She said it is meant to praise a past era when politics and religion were less divisive.

“Faith, hope, love are what I choose,” the lyrics read. “Yea, yea, a Jimmy Carter kinda Christian. No, no, I ain’t talking ’bout religion. Just wanna walk a mile in those size 11 shoes.”

The first and only vice-presidential debate is Tuesday. Republican nominee Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) and Democratic nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will face off in person, and it could be the last debate before the election.

Vice-presidential candidates can make a difference in tight races, said Joel Goldstein, a vice-presidential scholar at St. Louis University. And this campaign has remained a margin-of-error race in all seven major swing states despite many twists and turns.

Vance in particular has the potential to be a polarizing figure onstage, since he’s one of the most unpopular vice-presidential candidates in modern history and has helped galvanize some on the left for his past comments denigrating “childless cat ladies” and immigrants.

“Look at vice-presidential debates as ways to create momentum or blunt momentum,” added Jim Kessler, a Democratic strategist with the center-left think tank Third Way. “You don’t score touchdowns in vice-presidential debates, but you can gain yards or you can lose yards.”

Here’s what each candidate needs to do to win the debate — and maybe score a few hard-fought points in an extraordinarily close race.

Both have to hype — and probably defend — their bosses

Former president Donald Trump had a rough debate last month, missing opportunities to try to pin Vice President Kamala Harris to unpopular Biden administration policies. Vance will probably to try to score points where Trump couldn’t. That could mean he focuses less on Walz, who was virtually unknown on the national stage until Harris selected him as her running mate.

“Unlike his partner on the ticket, Vance needs to be disciplined,” said Stan Barnes, a former Republican Arizona state senator.

Walz will probably be singularly focused on promoting Harris to undecided voters, particularly men who might be on the fence about voting for the first Black and Indian American woman to top the ballot.

“It seems to be that Walz acts in an appropriately deferential way when the two of them are campaigning together, and that underscores the fact she is the Democratic Party leader,” said Goldstein, the vice-presidential scholar. “And that as far as he’s concerned, that’s exactly how it should be.”

Vance needs to explain his past comments about Trump

Before he became a U.S. senator in 2023, Vance was extraordinarily critical of Trump, calling him “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin” and possibly “America’s Hitler.” He has since said Trump’s presidency won him over.

But even at the end of Trump’s presidency, Vance was harshly criticizing his now-running mate. The Washington Post reported that in private Twitter messages in 2020, Vance said that Trump “thoroughly failed to deliver” on his economic agenda, and he predicted Joe Biden would win that year’s election.

It’s a tough position for Vance to be in, especially since he’ll also be focused on winning Trump’s praise, a task all Trump acolytes seem to be focused on when they’re in the spotlight.

But Vance is a regular on cable news. Although Walz has made a name for himself during public appearances, too: He got the vice-presidential nomination after referring to Republicans as “weird.”

Vance may need to address his false claims about immigration

When Trump falsely said while debating Harris that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs, he had plucked that information from Vance, who threw out the possibility on social media a day earlier. Since then, the conspiracy theory has followed Vance, resulting in headlines when he doubled down after the debate, even after it was so clearly false. Then Vance said it was okay to make up stories if it led the media to cover immigration.

The irony of all these unforced errors is that immigration is actually a strong issue for Republicans. Trump routinely leads on the issue over Harris in polls, especially with swing voters.

But on Tuesday, Vance could be stuck responding to questions about his falsehoods on immigrants eating pets in Springfield instead of being able to focus on border issues more broadly, including how they’re changing some communities — much safer territory for a Republican.

“There’s a real problem for a small community to handle that many immigrants all at one time,” said former Wisconsin Republican state senator Kathy Bernier, who will be closely watching how this debate moves voters in her key swing state.

Walz needs to appeal to voters just tuning in

Walz embodies the Midwestern style that Harris’s campaign hopes will attract exurban voters in must-win states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

That’s because while both he and Harris embrace liberal policies, Walz — a gun owner and former football coach — grew up in rural America and wears camouflage. The whole point of picking Walz, Democrats say, was for him to help Harris win over voters who view her as a San Francisco elite.

On the campaign trail, he’s leaned into his “aw-shucks” personality. “It’s nobody’s darn business,” Walz said at a rally earlier this month while speaking about abortion rights.

But Walz is also anxious about how he’ll perform, The Post reported. While he has debated at the state level, insiders said he’s worried about letting the campaign down.

Walz may need to defend his actions as governor and his military record

Since becoming governor of Minnesota in 2019, Walz has unapologetically championed liberal causes.

He has worked with a Democratic majority in the state Capitol to enact liberal policies: protecting rights to abortion and gender-transition care, helping move the state toward clean energy, restoring voting rights for felons, expanding background checks for gun purchases, legalizing recreational marijuana, allowing undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses, and instituting free tuition for low-income residents, free public school meals, and paid family and medical leave.

And he’s embraced the liberal label. “What a monster. Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health-care decisions,” he said sarcastically, when asked how conservatives might frame his record.

Separately, Walz served in the military for 24 years, and some of his record has come under scrutiny. Such as: He never saw combat, but while campaigning for governor a few years ago, he indicated he had by talking about “weapons of war that I carried in war.” Walz later told CNN his “grammar’s not always correct.”

Tim Walz, who became Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick partially on the strength of a viral, unscripted cable-news appearance in which he called Donald Trump and JD Vance “weird,” is a surprisingly bubble-wrapped campaigner.

The Minnesota governor rarely interacts directly with undecided voters within view of the press. Instead, much of his independent travel involves thanking and encouraging people who already support the Democratic ticket. His first solo trips have involved drop-bys at campaign offices, where he has offered to jump on calls by phone-bankers; visits with fellow Democratic governors; feeding a baby cow; and plenty of retail stops for dessert: milkshakes, whoopie pies, cake, chocolate-covered pretzels and stroopwafels.

Before heading to debate prep in Northern Michigan this weekend, where he answered three shouted questions, Walz had only stopped once to take questions from his traveling press corps — a 90-second exchange at the Minnesota State Fair. That conversation ended when Walz was asked about six hostages killed in Gaza and did not answer. Since joining the ticket he’s given some local interviews, but far fewer than he did while serving as a campaign surrogate.

Vice-presidential candidates are by their nature secondary figures, and often recede into the background, aiming not to harm the ticket.

But Walz’s conservative approach to campaigning stands in contrast to that of Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), whose stint as the vice-presidential nominee has spurred headlines about his comments and controversies, including his role in spreading false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in his home state. Vance has regularly participated in interviews with both traditional and new media. He frequently takes questions from the reporters covering his campaign travel, often combatively sparring with the journalists who cover him.

In the lead-up to the candidates’ debate showdown Tuesday night, Walz has been the more cautious candidate. At a college-football game in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, for example, he met with about 30 student supporters at the airport at a distance where Walz’s brief conversations were inaudible to the press. Later, Walz’s staff again kept reporters at a distance as he visited a tailgate party under a Harris-Walz branded tent, making it impossible to know if he spoke to anyone not already persuaded by the Harris campaign’s pitch. During the game, Walz sat with former congressman Beto O’Rourke and met with more students — all behind the closed doors of a luxury suite.

When he appears in public, Walz is prone to talk fast, at times rapidly running through his stump speech when using a teleprompter, which he has said he was not used to using before accepting the role, or peppering his prepared remarks with added anecdotes and stories. He sharply criticizes Trump, and connects his personal biography with issues — such as reproductive rights and gun control — that appeal to the Democratic base.

He sometimes stumbles over quotes or seems to misspeak. On the trail, for example, Walz has repeatedly told a story about being on a bus tour with Harris and seeing a group of their supporters on one side of the street and a group of Trump supporters (who he jokes are “real independent thinkers” with matching red hats) on the other. In the story, Walz says that Harris told him that they need to fight for both groups, and that their policies can affect those who did not support them.

But Walz has told different versions of the story at different times. On three occasions, at rallies and fundraisers, Walz said the moment occurred in Pennsylvania, and on three occasions he said it occurred in Savannah, Ga. The campaign declined to comment on where the interaction actually took place, but after The Washington Post asked about it, Walz removed any reference to a specific location from his next retelling of the story.

Republicans have criticized Walz for inconsistencies in how he has described his biography — for example, that he said he carried weapons in war, but never deployed in a war zone, and that he said his daughter was conceived via IVF when he and his wife, Gwen, actually used a different type of fertility treatment.

Walz has acknowledged he misspoke about the weapons and the IVF, and brushed off such moments as him wearing his emotions on his sleeve and speaking passionately about issues that motivate him.

“My wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar’s not always correct,” he explained in a joint interview with Harris on CNN, when asked about his past inaccurate statements.

Despite those stumbles, Walz has been an asset to the campaign. In joint rally appearances with Harris, Walz acts as the ultimate hype man. Onstage he is constantly moving — his hands clutched over his heart, then out to the side as if showing off Harris, then waving high in the air, then together as if in prayer, bowing in thanks to attendees. He will stretch his arms up high to point both fingers in the air, and when joined onstage by Harris or members of Congress even lift his feet in the air as if in a kick line while raising arms with them.

He’s shown an ability to hobnob with elite donors. He’s a regular keynote guest at Harris Victory Fund fundraisers, speaking in exclusive hotel ballrooms and the homes of wealthy donors, including at three climate focused fundraisers in New York City last week that brought him to the apartment of Alex Soros and Huma Abedin.

And he has psyched up the Democratic base, slotting into the role of happy warrior. He’s joked about his identity as an old, straight, White man, and much of his travel has been to rural, White areas. Much of his outreach has focused on the “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. He’s become the campaign’s top emissary to labor groups, speaking at numerous union events, and many of his recent campaign swings have included meetings with college students where he can lean into his role as a former public school teacher and coach.

As he’s traveled across the swing states, he’s been inundated with supporters professing their love for him, like a volunteer in Arizona who asked if they could get married. Many admirers admit they didn’t know who he was a month ago, like the host of a Dallas fundraiser who told gathered donors “I was not paying attention to who the governor of Minnesota was, and what he was doing, until about five weeks ago.”

In interviews, new fans of Walz have cited his folksy appeal and relatability as winning them over in short order.

“He just makes you smile,” said Kandice Lora, 43, a Las Vegas flight attendant who attended a joint Harris-Walz rally in Nevada last month. She compared Walz to “the dad next door that’s going to come and help you with your car, or fill your groceries when you’re sick, or something like that.”

Kimberley Colbaugh, 64, who attended the same rally, took it a step further: “Tim Walz is Santa Claus. I am thrilled with Tim Walz.”

Less than two weeks into his presidency, Jimmy Carter sat before a crackling fire in a cardigan sweater and asked Americans to make sacrifices in the face of natural gas shortages and a brutally cold winter.

The speech would be ridiculed and mischaracterized for nearly half a century. To this day, Republicans invoke it as evidence of what they call a defeatist Democratic Party, especially Carter’s exhortation for Americans to conserve energy by turning down the thermostat.

Yet the speech built on similar themes articulated by Carter’s two Republican predecessors, and it kicked off a landmark presidency for the cause of environmental conservation. Plus, it made a major fashion statement.

In the nationally televised Feb. 2, 1977, fireside chat, his first speech to the nation since his inauguration, Carter started off with his trademark earnestness.

“Tomorrow will be two weeks since I became president,” he said. “I’ve spent a lot of time deciding how I can be a good president.”

It was a time when the United States was overly dependent on foreign oil, and the new president said Americans “must face the fact that the energy shortage is permanent. There is no way we can solve it quickly.”

Then he issued this challenge: “All of us must learn to waste less energy. Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night, we could save half the current shortage of natural gas. There is no way that I, or anyone else in the government, can solve our energy problems if you are not willing to help.”

Two weeks earlier, on Jan. 21, his first full day in office, Carter had previewed the conservation pep talk, issuing a statement urging Americans to lower the thermostat “to 65 degrees in the daytime and lower at night.”

Conservatives have mocked Carter’s message of self-sacrifice. Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) has said it inspired him as a 12-year-old to become a Republican.

“I was in the sixth grade, I turned on the TV, and I watched Jimmy Carter have a sweater on and tell me to turn the heating down,” McCarthy said in a record-breaking 8½-hour speech in 2021. “He told me that the best days were behind us, that as an American I had to accept less. That wasn’t how I was raised.”

Mostly lost to history is that Carter’s predecessor, President Gerald Ford, made a similar plea when he unveiled his ill-fated Whip Inflation Now (WIN) plan in a 1974 speech: “To help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less.” And the year before that, in response to severe energy shortages brought on by the Arab oil embargo of 1973, President Richard M. Nixon urged Americans to lower their thermostats by at least 6 degrees to achieve a national daytime average of 68 degrees.

But neither Republican president used a wardrobe accessory to reinforce their message. And many people have shorthanded Carter’s message to “Put on a sweater,” although he never told anyone to do that. (Even the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library erroneously tweeted, in recognition of the first day of autumn a couple of years ago, that the former president “encouraged Americans to turn the heat down to conserve energy and throw on a sweater instead!”) Instead, sitting in front of shelves stocked with books, Carter made the point more subtly by sporting a cardigan himself, over a shirt and tie, in a look that resembled a college professor’s.

“Obviously their motives are different but President Carter is doing for sweaters today what Lana Turner did for them in the 1940s,” Washington Post fashion editor Nina S. Hyde wrote in a story headlined “President Carter, the Sweater Man,” published on Feb. 5, 1977. “Probably not since the hey days of that Sweater Girl have Americans been so aware of people wearing sweaters.”

She added: “It’s not likely that Carter was wearing a sweater merely for the warmth it provided but rather to underscore the informality of his fireside chat and to put across his message of energy conservation. … He was wearing a V-neck wool cardigan, sometimes called a ‘grandfather sweater’ since it sells best as a Christmas gift for older men.”

Hyde quoted designer Ralph Lauren as saying that Carter “wore a sweater to establish his own identity. It should have an impact greater than a movie star on an athlete. It could change the etiquette of clothes.”

In 2012, Time magazine listed Carter’s sweater among its top 10 political fashion statements, noting that the magazine predicted in 1977 that the cardigan “may prove to be the most memorable symbol of an Administration that promises to make steady use of symbolism.” At the time, even an unnamed Republican “insider” grudgingly conceded, “He was folks, and folks is in. I hate to say it, but from a purely analytical point of view, I loved it.”

Not everyone was as enamored with the sweater, which drew its share of taunts. A 1978 “Saturday Night Live” skit, for example, featured Dan Aykroyd as a sweater-wearing Carter, giving a “plant-side chat” in honor of spring and urging Americans to burn 8 percent of their money to tamp down inflation.

In fact, Carter also addressed inflation and several other topics in his fireside chat, although the thermostat remains the enduring image. And while his focus on conservation was ahead of its time, not all of Carter’s energy proposals in that speech would pass muster with environmentalists today, including his plan to “stress development of our rich coal reserves in an environmentally sound way.”

Still, he did tout research on solar and other renewable energy sources and would install solar panels on the White House two years later. (Ronald Reagan then removed them.) Carter, who designated 56 million acres of Alaska wilderness as federally protected in 1978, is recognized today as one of the nation’s most consequential environmental presidents.

And when it came to conserving energy, Carter did as he preached, selling the presidential yacht the Sequoia and unplugging White House TV sets, according to PBS’s 2002 “American Experience” Carter documentary. In the film, his vice president, Walter Mondale, recalled with a laugh: “He turned off the air conditioners, and it was so hot in the White House, people would come in there — it was unbelievable. It would be a hundred above in there.”

Hurricane Helene’s destructive path across western North Carolina threatens to upend the fall election in the key battleground, with halted mail service disrupting absentee voting, thousands of voters cut off from polling locations and election administrators scrambling to adjust.

Even as emergency response teams continued their search for survivors of the devastating storm and airlifted food and water into remote communities, state and local election teams began the difficult task this week of assessing damage to voting machines, paper ballots and polling locations. Multiple polling locations — no one knows how many — were flooded and are unlikely to be usable on Election Day.

Especially worrisome to some officials was how to ensure voting access for those who plan to cast their ballots by mail. Many residents have temporarily left the area due to damaged homes, impassable roads and a lack of potable water, with return dates unknown.

The challenging circumstances could suppress turnout in a part of the state where nearly 1 million people cast ballots in 2020, out of nearly 6 million cast statewide. President Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden in North Carolina that year by fewer than 80,000 votes, his smallest margin of victory in any state. A Washington Post poll conducted mostly before Helene hit found that Trump holds a two-point lead over Vice President Kamala Harris, a result within the survey’s margin of error.

In 2020, Trump won the 25 western counties with federal disaster declarations with nearly 62 percent of the vote. But one of the hardest hit communities, Asheville and surrounding Buncombe County, is a Democratic stronghold that Biden won with 60 percent of voters.

With the Atlantic hurricane season spanning from June 1 to Nov. 30 each year, this is not the first time a major storm has threatened election administration. Superstorm Sandy struck New York and New Jersey just a week before the 2012 presidential election, forcing local leaders to contend with flooded polling locations and figure out how to help displaced voters cast their ballots.

Helene also wrought destruction in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, but none so severe or widespread as in North Carolina.

State law in North Carolina allows anyone to ask for an absentee ballot to be mailed to a temporary home. But with the U.S. Postal Service suspending service across a wide swath of western North Carolina due to Helene’s impact, it was unclear whether those ballots would arrive — and whether they could be mailed back. Scores of roads and bridges remain closed across the region, many of them washed away entirely.

Overseas and military ballots were sent on Sept. 20 to those who requested them. Domestic absentee ballots were sent Sept. 24. That means many were probably in transit when the storm hit and potentially destroyed, said Devon Houck, who directs elections in Ashe County, on the Tennessee border. At least one post office in the county was flooded, and hundreds of mailboxes are gone, she and others said.

The Postal Service suspended service in Zip codes that are home to more than 1.3 million North Carolinians. The agency said the locations would reopen “as conditions are safe.”

“We will still hold an election and will make sure everyone gets an opportunity to vote,” Houck said. “It will just be different and harder.”

State election officials emphasized in a news release Monday afternoon that anyone who has requested an absentee ballot can choose to vote in person instead. If a ballot is lost or otherwise unaccounted for, voters can also request a new one. North Carolina runs a robust ballot-tracking system that allows voters to see when their completed ballot has arrived back at their county election headquarters.

Election headquarters in 14 affected counties were closed as of Monday. The status of one office, in far western Haywood County, was unknown to state officials due to downed communications.

“Our hearts go out to these people that we consider to be elections family,” Karen Brinson Bell, director of the state board of elections, said during an emergency meeting Monday to contend with the storm’s effects. “They are such conscientious public servants. At a time when many of them still don’t have contact with family members, and some have total losses at their own personal properties, we are trying to be as responsive to their needs as we can.”

Bell said one election worker walked five miles Monday to check on the status of the Buncombe County election office in Asheville.

Complicating efforts by the state board of elections to assist counties are recent actions by the GOP-controlled state legislature, which last year made it more difficult for the board’s staff to take emergency actions such as allowing counties to swap out one polling location for another. The legislature also changed state law to require absentee ballots to arrive in their county no later than Election Day, eliminating the prior grace period that allowed any ballot postmarked by that day to arrive up to three days later.

Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, said he hopes state lawmakers will reinstate the grace period and possibly even extend it in the wake of Helene. If they don’t, voting rights groups may seek legal intervention, he said.

“Most of western North Carolina does not have operational postal service. The sending and delivering of those absentee ballots has now been put on pause indefinitely,” he said.

A huge part of the recovery will be voter education, officials said. Many voters are cut off from the internet, cellphone networks and even grocery stores. Getting the word out about changed voting locations or how to vote by mail will be a huge challenge, they said.

“I know there will be some folks that voting is very low on their priority list right now,” said Matt Snyder, election director in western North Carolina’s Watauga County. “So what we’re hoping is that by keeping all our sites open and making available places that people can vote, that they will find the time to come to vote despite all the other things they are dealing with.”

Snyder added that finding alternate voting locations will be a challenge in a part of the country where that search is difficult at the best of times.

“We’re looking at any and all solutions, even putting up a tent if we have to somewhere,” he said.

Jacob Bogage and Clare Ence Morse contributed to this report.