On the first day of presidential voting in North Carolina this month, people clad in sparkly cowboy hats and red baseball caps snaked across the car park outside the polling station in Rutherfordton, a small town in the state’s west. They had two aims: to vote early and to vote for Donald Trump.
Karen Garris, whose eldest son calls her “Trumpzilla”, wore a T-shirt reading “God, Guns & Trump”. She had been waiting in the line for an hour. Her top concern, she said, was illegal immigration — a favourite Trump talking point.
Draped in an American flag, she was among scores of voters casting votes as part of record early turnout in the swing state of North Carolina, where victory could decide the outcome of one of the tightest presidential races in US history.
Although North Carolina has backed just two Democrats for president since 1968, its booming liberal cities of Raleigh, Charlotte and Asheville have provided the party with a growing voting bloc.
The Harris campaign has also bet that Mark Robinson, the provocative Republican gubernatorial candidate accused of making racist and lewd comments on an online pornography forum, would drive moderate voters towards the Democratic ticket.
Despite this, Trump still leads the state by a razor-thin margin of 1.4 percentage points, according to the FT’s polling average. High turnout in traditionally Republican rural areas of the state such as Rutherfordton could deliver the White House to Trump.
The destruction of Hurricane Helene has added more uncertainty to the race, with Republicans linking the recovery effort to the immigration crisis at the southern border.
Trump has falsely claimed the chief US domestic disaster agency — the Federal Emergency Management Agency — had no money for rescue and recovery because it had spent billions housing illegal immigrants. The claims, amplified by Trump backer Elon Musk, have taken off on social media.
There were signs those messages were having an impact in Rutherfordton, which was badly hit by Helene.
“Helene has cemented the feeling that they don’t care about us,” said Cheryl Lake, a Trump voter and stay-at-home mum in town, who decided she would vote when the queue was shorter.
She had dropped by the polling station with the hopes of seeing the Trump campaign’s visiting battle bus, which carried South Dakota governor and Trump campaign favourite Kristi Noem.
Charity Waters, a manager at 24-hour diner franchise Waffle House, had no intention of delaying her vote. That morning, Waters had been scraping piles of hash brown together on the long griddle, shouting at colleagues: “You gotta go vote! We gotta go vote!”
“We get $750 but we send millions of dollars overseas to help others — it’s not right,” said Waters, referring to the initial amount provided by Fema to hurricane victims.
“Trump makes sure his people are safe, he’s making sure our world is taken care of before other foreign worlds.”
Fema was forced to publicly fact-check the $750 claim after it was made by Trump, noting that storm victims were eligible for additional financial aid.
Outside the polling station, many Trump voters expressed anger at what they said were high levels of illegal immigration in to their town — which is more than 1,000 miles from the southern US border.
“The illegal immigrants around here are just dropped off in buses, all the money is going towards supporting them,” said Lynn Lombard, a 70-year-old Trump voter from Rutherfordton who rents out vacation homes.
“If you cross the border illegally you get more help from the government than Americans,” agreed her husband, Raymond.
Other voters were concerned that immigration was boosting homelessness in their rural county, which has a population of fewer than 65,000 people.
“The homelessness is increasing because they bus them in,” said Roger Short, a 62-year-old who runs a YouTube channel featuring both Christian and bodybuilding content.
The fears about illegal immigrants echo one of Trump’s main campaign themes: that the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris White House has allowed an influx of criminal aliens into the US that is “poisoning the blood of our country”.
US Census data shows that few of these immigrants have reached rural North Carolina. The number of foreign-born residents who are not US citizens in Rutherford County increased from 1.5 per cent of its overall population in 2018 to 2.5 per cent in 2023. Just over 5 per cent of people in North Carolina were not US citizens.
Down the road in neighbouring Polk County, about a dozen Fema workers helped people who dropped in to complete applications for disaster aid at a quiet public library outside the town of Columbus. A bored deputy sheriff, posted to protect Fema staff, sat outside the room.
Susan and John Sanders, who did not divulge their voting intentions, said they had lost their home in nearby Flat Rock when three trees crushed their house.
“We’re in the system,” said Susan. “They’re still processing us, we don’t really have any complaints”.
Ted Karet, a retired IT worker who generally votes Democrat, said there was no sense of disappointment in Fema’s response.
“Everybody is very pleased,” he said.
As the queue grew at Rutherfordton’s polling station, overstretched officials asked some voters to leave their campaign placards — which read “Trump Secure Border, Kamala Open Border”, or “Trump Safety, Kamala Crime” — behind a taped line across which political campaigning was not allowed.
A handful of Democrat voters — who only quietly identified themselves — said they wanted to keep Trump out of the White House and lamented the division in their county.
“I think she’ll be able to bring together America,” said James Hamilton, a child therapist, of Kamala Harris.
Down the street, Zaida Cilone, a 21-year-old who worked at Main Street Market, a cavernous coffee shop on the town’s central street, said she would vote Democrat. “It’s more about not wanting Trump.”
Her colleague, 18-year-old first-time voter Clare Coker, said she had not made up her mind.
For Garris, aka Trumpzilla, the choice was clear. “I don’t like the way he talks sometimes but I just put a blanket over my head,” she said. “He loves his country.”
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