The swing-state counties hit by Hurricane Helene mostly voted for Trump in 2020

Hurricane Helene has devastated large portions of the Southeast, including dozens of counties in the key presidential swing states of Georgia and North Carolina.

The states are vowing to proceed with voting, with some minor modifications, but it’s unclear how the displacement and property damage will ultimately impact who votes and how. What is clear is that most of the affected areas voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020, an NPR analysis finds.

Response to the hurricane, and the threat of Hurricane Milton, has become important to the presidential candidates, with less than a month of voting left. Vice President Harris and Trump have visited the area. As Harris vows she and President Biden will provide all federal assistance necessary, Trump has slammed their response and spread misleading and false information about available aid.

In 2020, almost 2.4 million votes were cast in the 82 counties that FEMA has now designated as places where residents qualify for some form of assistance in the two states. And in each state, Trump won a majority of the voters in those counties in the last presidential election.

Here's a look at how that breaks down:

In Georgia, Trump won 57.3% of the vote from the 53 affected counties – 504,393 votes to President Biden’s 375,700.

More than 880,000 people voted from these counties in 2020, more than 1 out of every 6 votes cast in the state.

Trump won 46 of the counties to Biden’s six, but it’s not unusual for a Republican to win far more counties than a Democrat, because Democrats’ votes are concentrated in populous cities and suburbs.

In the 2020 election, for example, Trump won 2,588 counties to Biden’s 551 overall, according to the Brookings Institution. When adding New England