By Michael Bitzer
In North Carolina, many western counties are still rebuilding and trying to get their lives back to 'normalcy' following the devastation of the September 2024 path of Hurricane Helene through many of the mountain communities.
On January 24, 2025, just days after being sworn into office, President Trump visited the NC mountains and said “I’ll be taking strong action to get North Carolina the support that you need to quickly recover and rebuild. We’re working on it very hard…” (see 7:48 of this video of the press conference).
However, a federal decision not to fully reimburse the recovery efforts has garnered wide-spread attention. A note: FEMA's decision was not to fully fund recovery efforts by the federal government at 100 percent, but rather continue funding at 90 percent.
Nine months after Helene's impact, the June 2025 Catawba-YouGov survey asked 1,000 North Carolinians the following:
"Do you approve or disapprove of FEMA’s decision to not extend 100%, but instead provide 90%, of federal matching reimbursement for North Carolina’s spending on Hurricane Helene debris removal and emergency protective measures for western North Carolina?"
Respondents were given the options of strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove, strongly disapprove, or don't know.
Based on the respondent's zip code input, I classified those respondents who live in one of the 28 FEMA designated counties (based on 9/28/24), as shown the map below:
I included the three most western counties of Cherokee, Graham, and Swain due to the Cherokee Tribal lands in the designation (and the number of respondents from those counties was fairly small in the survey). Only two counties--Alleghany and Avery--didn't have any respondents in the YouGov survey.
In total, 166 survey respondents have zip codes in those designated Helene counties, with the remaining 837 respondents 'not' in a Helene-designated county (see "Methodology" below about the poll).
Granted, it would be nice to have a larger sample size of Helene respondents, so we'll need to treat these results with caution.
However, Helene-impacted respondents appear to have a difference of opinion versus the rest of the state when it comes to FEMA's decision:
While the non-Helene counties of North Carolina mirror the state's overall response, 64 percent of Helene-impacted respondents disapprove of FEMA's decision not to fully fund reimbursement.
As a reminder: if you take the 28 counties as a 'region,' President Trump won with 62 percent of the collective vote, compared to the rest of the state where Trump got 49 percent of the vote.
Only two counties--Buncombe and Watauga--voted for Harris in the region. (Note: Alexander voted for Trump with 79 percent, while Mitchell voted 77 percent for Trump).
As always with public opinion, shifts can occur over time. But in a region that gave significant electoral support to Trump, and with nearly two-thirds of public opinion disapproving of the decision not to fully fund recovery efforts by FEMA, little slights might be remembered for elected officials who proclaim taking "strong action to get North Carolina the support that you need to quickly recover and rebuild."
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Dr. Michael Bitzer holds the Leonard Chair of Political Science and directs the Center for North Carolina Politics & Public Service at Catawba College, where he is a professor of politics & history.
METHODOLOGY: The Catawba-YouGov June 2025 poll, paid for by Catawba College’s Center for North Carolina Politics & Public Service and conducted by YouGov from June 10-26, has a margin of error of +/- 3.56 percent for the 1,000 weighted respondents who are 18 and older and live in North Carolina, with larger margins of error among sub-groups. All results should be interpreted as informative and not determinative.
YouGov interviewed 1126 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 1000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The sampling frame is a politically representative "modeled frame" of US adults, based upon the American Community Survey (ACS) public use microdata file, public voter file records, the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration supplements, the 2020 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, and the 2020 CES surveys, including demographics and 2020 presidential vote.
The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined, and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, and region. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.
The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 and 2024 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories), and education (4-categories), to produce the final weight.
