The storm’s damage has drawn early comparisons to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 people in Louisiana and became a political quagmire for then-President George W. Bush.
“The burden is on President Biden’s shoulders, because his reputation now with many voters is that he’s only marginally up to the job. Anything that seems a bit slow, even if it’s not slow … will have some political fallout for him and those associated with him. So I think the burden is clearly on the shoulder of the Democrats,” said Stephen Smith, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
“There’s a tendency to just blame everyone in power if things don’t go as people expect them to,” he added. “I do think that the administration and the Harris campaign are hypersensitive about how things went with Katrina, and they’ll do everything possible to be visible and active in their response.”
Biden says he’ll visit North Carolina, a battleground state that has been battered by the storm, later this week.
Harris, meanwhile, cut short a campaign trip in Nevada on Monday to fly back to Washington and plans to visit the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters to get updates on the federal disaster response.
The federal government’s response has already become a political target, with Trump claiming during a visit to Valdosta, Ga., that Gov. Brian Kemp (R) couldn’t get in touch with Biden, though Kemp had told reporters earlier Monday that he had already spoken to the president.
Republicans more broadly are looking to put Biden and Harris on the defensive, questioning their minute-by-minute movements over the weekend.
“Democrats invented hurricane politics and now Democrats might get burned by it. You’ve got millions without power, you’ve got tens of thousands who’ve lost everything. On the ground, that’s certainly going to weigh on the election results, particularly when you’re talking about Georgia, North Carolina that will be decided by tens of thousands of votes,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist and veteran of presidential campaigns.
Read more from our colleague Alexander Bolton at TheHill.com.
