Early voting begins in the battleground state of North Carolina on Thursday, as the western part of the state still feels the impacts of Hurricane Helene’s flooding three weeks later. More than 400 voting locations in the state’s 100 counties were expected to open Thursday for the early voting period,

Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., and Michael Bitzer, an expert on North Carolina politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., cautioned in a blog post against reading too much into the data.

The number of people casting ballots on the first day of early in-person voting in presidential battleground North Carolina exceeded the first-day total four years ago — even as Hurricane Helene recov