| By Jennifer A Dlouhy and Ari Natter For a few moments Tuesday night, the men vying to be the next US vice president found common ground. Both Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz agreed that Hurricane Helene, which has killed more than 150 people and left a trail of death and devastation across the Southeast US, was a horrible tragedy. The storm brought floodwaters to mountain towns and inland fields far from the nation's coasts, underscoring the immediacy of the climate crisis. "People are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns," Vance said.  Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg But the similarities ended there. Vance, who in 2020 was definitive in acknowledging we "of course have a climate problem," on Tuesday borrowed a page from Donald Trump's playbook by raising questions about the cause of the threat. There's a lot of talk about "this idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change," Vance said, before positing: "Let's just say that's true — just for the sake of argument, so we're not just arguing about weird science." It was a blunt reminder of the chasm between the Republican and Democratic presidential tickets, when it comes to the climate crisis. Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to claw back investments in what he calls Washington's "green new scam" while mocking wind turbines and electric vehicles. Read More: Pollution, Wind, EVs: Trump Risks Upending Biden's Climate Work Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, is largely expected to continue the trajectory charted by President Joe Biden, using a combination of federal incentives and regulations to encourage clean energy deployment and slash greenhouse gas emissions. Walz called out Trump for calling climate change a "hoax" and lauded the Biden-Harris administration for spurring what he called "massive investments, the biggest in global history" in clean energy production and manufacturing. Farmers in Minnesota already get it, Walz said: "My farmers in Minnesota know climate change is real. They've seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back." But, he added: "Our No. 1 export cannot be topsoil from erosion from these massive storms." By Zahra Hirji The unprecedented flooding caused by Hurricane Helene as it barreled into western North Carolina, washing away homes, roads and entire towns, is already disrupting voting there and injecting new uncertainty into the state's high-stakes elections. Many of the deaths linked to Helene were in North Carolina's Buncombe County, home to the city of Asheville. With the status of polling places in the region unclear and thousands of residents displaced. "There may be polling places affected by mudslides. There may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads. There may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them," said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, in a call with reporters on Tuesday.  A family removes items from their home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Old Fort, North Carolina, on Sept. 30. Photographer: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images It's not just election day voting that's a concern. Some 250,000 absentee ballot requests have been made across the state, with roughly 10,000 just in the Asheville region, according to Bob Phillips, executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Common Cause North Carolina. Some of those ballots had only just been delivered or were in the mail when Helene rammed through. A lot is at stake in the state's elections this year. North Carolina exerts outsized influence over who will end up in the White House. Nowhere is more of a toss-up: The latest polling shows Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are effectively tied. And when catastrophe strikes, "it can cause voters to participate in elections at a lower rate," said Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. Yet past disasters in the US show election officials can get creative to help ensure this doesn't happen — from temporary voting sites to mobile polling stations. The question is whether state election officials and the legislature embrace this type of flexibility. If they don't, Republicans may have more to lose, Phillips noted: 23 of the 25 counties hit hardest by the storm and designated to get federal disaster assistance are overwhelmingly Republican and voted for Trump in 2020. Read the full story here — and for unlimited access to climate and energy news, please subscribe. | 
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