They lost their homes and possessions. They’re showing up to vote in NC.

BURNSVILLE, North Carolina — When Hurricane Helene swept through Yancey County, the flood waters took Byrdene Byerly’s home and nearly all her possessions. She escaped from her house with only the muddy clothes on her back and her pocketbook.

But despite all the devastation, on the first day of early voting, Byerly was at the county Board of Elections to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris.

“I’m soon to be 82 years old, and I’ve voted since I was 21,” she said outside the polling place Thursday. “I always vote.”

Hundreds of thousands of voters in the mountains of western North Carolina are still reeling after the Sept. 27 storm destroyed homes and communities, obliterated roads and water systems and left at least 95 people dead in the critical swing state. But the presidential race here is now very much back on, after conventional campaigning came to a halt in this part of North Carolina — a state that Donald Trump had been waging an aggressive fight to defend when Harris suddenly made the race much more competitive late this summer.

As early voting has begun in North Carolina — drawing record-setting statewide turnout on Thursday — and the process of restoring water, electricity, road access and mail service is underway, both parties have resumed some of their campaign activities in the affected areas. Democrats last week held an early-voting kickoff event in Asheville and are holding both get-out-the-vote and relief events. Trump on Monday will make his first visit back to western North Carolina since the hurricane last month, while his allies on the ground are making arrangements to bring isolated voters down blocked country roads on ATVs, if needed, to ensure his rural supporters can get to the polls.

Early GOP concerns that depressed turnout in the red-leaning region could cost Trump in the southern battleground have largely been replaced by resolve to mobilize his supporters to the polls, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republican campaign officials, operatives and county party chairs working in the state. Trump and Republicans have seized on anger from residents on the ground that meaningful federal aid has not come as quickly as they would like, despite a number of GOP officials from the area praising the government’s early response.

“Arguably, they're more eager. I mean, the good thing for us is that President Trump has the single most committed and intense voters of probably any American politician in history,” said James Blair, Trump’s political director. “That is definitely what we get on the ground, with people saying things like they will crawl through the mud and walk down the mountain barefoot, whatever it takes to cast their vote — because it is their protest to being screwed in the response, on top of the fact that they wanted to vote for the president, anyway.”

Sarah Sanford, walking out of the Yancey County Board of Elections Thursday with her sister and brother-in-law, said her trailer was spared, despite having no water or electricity for 20 days. She spent hours trying to get from work back home to her ill and disabled husband the day of the flood, trudging through mud and relying on neighbors to help to get past inaccessible roads and a washed out bridge leading to her mobile home park. The 46-year-old found her husband safe, but he passed away a week ago, Sanford said, the grief still fresh.

Her sister Helen and brother-in-law Joseph Marotta, who is fighting cancer and uses an oxygen tank, stayed for days at a shelter. All of their eyes were misty as they spoke about the harrowing three weeks they had endured.

And they all wanted to come cast their ballots for Trump at the first opportunity.

“If it wasn't for Samaritan's Purse and some of these other church foundations, we wouldn't be getting the help,” Sanford said. “Our current political party that's currently running this country, one was on vacation, the other one was wherever she was, campaigning. And the one person that came down, stuck his feet in the river, helped pull somebody out, was giving donations out, was Trump.”

Despite disinformation and online memes generated by artificial intelligence that depicted Trump knee-deep in water, wearing a life vest and rescuing puppies and children, the former president has not yet made the trek to the disaster zone. Some Republican officials in the state had privately pushed for him to delay visiting during the initial recovery period, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, though Harris met with the mayor of Asheville and emergency management leaders in Charlotte on Oct. 5.

The situation, despite remaining dire in some areas, has improved in most places. In an interview two weeks before early voting started, Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, fought back tears as she processed how to balance the election with the immediate devastation many in her state were living through.

“Everyone keeps asking me about voting locations and everything,” Clayton said on Oct. 3, nearly a week after flood waters swept through western North Carolina. “There are still people who have not been found.”

And John Anglin, the chair of the Yancey County Republican Party, said he remembers the first time he thought about the election once the flood hit — it was Monday, Sept. 30, two days later.

“Election off?” someone messaged him after inquiring about a place to land a plane delivery of supplies.

“Great question,” Anglin wrote back. “Haven't even thought about it with everything going on. Not sure what will take place. This is so bad.”

But since then, a volunteer went in and started cleaning up the Yancey GOP headquarters. Party officials are in talks with election officials about how voting will take place on Election Day in the hardest hit parts of the county, which may likely involve National Guard tents being set up. “It’s going to take years, years, to rebuild some of these communities,” Anglin said in an interview, but said that voting still matters in the meantime.

“I think the biggest thing is, right now, just giving people the opportunity to do something that they remember before this,” Anglin said. “They remember going and casting their ballots to elect their leadership.”

In the immediate aftermath, the state’s Democrats had paused campaigning in the region, including all texting operations besides checking in on people and suggesting where to find storm-related resources. But now, despite the Democrats’ continued work on local relief efforts in the region, they’re back to deploying volunteers to help mobilize voters, according to a Harris campaign official and activists on the ground.

Harris’ team is canvassing in Burke, Jackson, Buncombe, Henderson and Watauga counties, a campaign official said, which includes a “wellness check” as part of the interaction. That’s in addition to continuing to travel to Tennessee and South Carolina to pick up water, food, batteries and other supplies to deliver to North Carolina, while they’re planning community relief events in harder hit areas.

Leslie Carey, chair of the Henderson County Democratic Party, lost her home in the storm. But the local party is still working to resume all the big plans of canvassing and campaigning they had before the hurricane.

“Everything came to a halt that we’d been working on,” said Dalton Buchanan, chair of the Henderson County Young Democrats. “It became not a priority for a bit. It was just in the backside of our mind, that there was politics happening.”

But the reality of the election crept back in, Buchanan said, “when we had to deal with the right-wing extremist people making threats to FEMA, and bad misinformation spreading everywhere.” He said he had to urge some of his own family members, distrustful of the federal government due to some of the GOP’s propaganda, to apply for aid after losing their homes.

This past weekend, the county party was finally back to canvassing and phone banking.

“As things get back into some sort of weird dystopian normal,” Buchanan said, “people are wanting to find something else to do. It’s kind of an outlet.”

Blair said Trump’s team “will throw the kitchen sink at educating the affected voters” on how they can cast their ballots now — “everything from television, radio, text messaging, phone calls, on the ground, guerrilla marketing, flier handouts, working in and around places that are giving out food and supplies, all of those sorts of things.”

“It’s a combination of old school and new school, anything and everything, all-of-the-above type approach,” Blair said.

Brett Callaway, chair of the Henderson County Republican Party, said his own daughter’s small business, an ice cream shop in Chimney Rock, was washed away in the storm. She and her husband are trying to rebuild their lives, but Callaway is under the impression they’re still planning to vote.

“Yes, we had a storm, and that's going to be a challenge to a lot of people,” Callaway said. “Some are still isolated — they can't get out of their homes, their driveways just washed away, things like that.

“But I think they’ll just crawl over broken glass to get to the polls,” Callaway continued. “They are so fed up.”

Likely Trump supporters were impacted nearly 2:1 compared to Harris voters, according to a Trump campaign official granted anonymity to discuss how the storm affected voters. At a meeting inside the Buncombe County Republican Party headquarters last week, local officials discussed that some 600,000 Republican voters were believed to have been affected by the floods. Michele Woodhouse, chair of the NCGOP’s 11th congressional district, emphasized to the small group that party officials plan to go to any length to ensure help reaches voters who need it.

Wearing a white “Trump Force Captain” hat, Teresa Rhinehart, a 63-year-old volunteer at the Buncombe GOP, said she still needs more clothing after many of her possessions were damaged in the flood. Since the storm, Rhinehart has started to travel from her home in Swannanoa to the GOP’s Asheville office nearly every day to volunteer, though her door-knocking for the Trump campaign has stopped. A trailer park near her house, where she had previously made connections with voters through the Trump Force 47 canvassing program, had been taken out by the storm. Swannanoa, a badly hit area, is where Trump is scheduled to visit and speak to members of the media on Monday.

“The other day I was so discouraged, I thought, I don’t know if I’m going to vote,” Rhinehart said. “Then I said, ‘Now Teresa, what would your mama say? Don’t be dumb.’”

Rhinehart said she hopes she still is allowed to travel to Mar-a-Lago after the election for a party she heard may be happening for Trump Force 47 volunteers who met their goals, despite no longer being able to door-knock in the areas she was focused on.

Wearing a white “Trump Force 47 Captain” hat, Teresa Rhinehart, a 63-year-old volunteer at the Buncombe GOP, said she still needs to secure more clothing after many of her possessions were damaged in the flood. Since the flood, Rhinehart has started to travel from her home in Swannanoa to the GOP’s Asheville office nearly every day to volunteer, though her door-knocking for the Trump campaign has stopped. A trailer park near her house, where she had previously made connections with voters through the Trump Force 47 program, had been taken out by the storm.

“The other day I was so discouraged, I thought, I don’t know if I’m going to vote,” Rhinehart said. “Then I said, ‘Now Teresa, what would your mama say? Don’t be dumb.’”

Rhinehart said she hopes she still is allowed to travel to Mar-A-Lago after the election for a party she heard may be happening for Trump Force 47 volunteers who met the goals, despite no longer being able to door-knock in the areas she was focused on.

Back in Swannanoa, a bent Trump-Vance “Make America Great Again!” yard sign was covered in mud on the side of the road, next to a pile of household debris from a part of town left in ruins.

At a home on an otherwise empty street, where “condemned” signs had been stuck on every house, a man loaded a few items into his vehicle. His elderly parents had lived there, and were now displaced — the contents of theirs and their neighbor’s homes strewn all around. Rescue officials had come to retrieve the residents as the floodwaters rose.

Asked whether the election was on his mind, the man was, unsurprisingly, uninterested in talking about his plan to vote. But he did have one parting thought.

“We haven’t seen any Democrats come here.”