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      More Than 400 Roads Closed in North Carolina After Damage From Helene

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      In addition to the power outages caused by Helene that have crippled the western part of North Carolina, swaths of roadways in the region were largely impassable on Saturday, prompting alerts from transportation officials that warned drivers to stay out of their vehicles.“The damage is so severe, we are telling drivers that unless it is an emergency, all roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed,” Aaron Moody, a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Transportation, said in an email.A photo released by the department showed a large section of roadway missing from a mountain pass.The department said that any civilian car on the road would hinder emergency responses. More than 400 roads were affected by the closure alert, including two major arteries for the region: Interstate 40 and Interstate 26, which Mr. Moody said were too damaged for cars to pass.Maria Whitehead, 51, was in Tennessee with her husband when Helene tore through Brevard, N.C., on Friday. Her two younger children were there, staying with Ms. Whitehead’s parents. After learning their children were safe, she and her husband embarked on a circuitous route on Saturday to find any way home.“We’ve studied the maps, we’ve got some local intel about a couple of routes that we can try tonight,” Ms. Whitehead said. “Otherwise, we’ll probably double back and stay with friends in Greenville, South Carolina, and try again tomorrow.”Landslides near Old Fort, N.C., about 20 miles east of Asheville, blocked off Interstate 40. A statement on Friday from the office of Gov. Roy Cooper said that people should shelter in place unless they were seeking higher ground.On Saturday night, the North Carolina Department of Transportation posted on X, with capitalization for emphasis: “We cannot say this enough: DO NOT TRAVEL IN OR TO WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA.” More

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      North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson treated for second-degree burns

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      North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Republican Mark Robinson, received burns on Friday night while attending a truck show as he was campaigning for governor, his campaign said.Robinson was making an appearance at the Mayberry truck show in Mount Airy when he was injured, campaign spokesperson Mike Lonergan said in a statement.Robinson was treated at Northern regional hospital in Mount Airy for second-degree burns, he added.“He is in good spirits, appreciates the outpouring of well wishes, and is excited to return to the campaign trail as scheduled first thing” on Saturday morning, Lonergan said.Lonergan didn’t immediately respond to texts seeking details on how and where the burns occurred. Robinson had made campaign stops starting on Friday morning with Moore county Republicans. He has four appearances scheduled for Saturday.Robinson, the lieutenant governor since 2021, is running against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Stein, the current attorney general. The current governor, Roy Cooper, a Democrat, was barred by term limits from running this fall.Many Republicans have distanced themselves recently from Robinson following a 19 September CNN report alleging he posted strongly worded racial and sexual comments on an online message board. A dozen staff members on his campaign or in the lieutenant governor’s office have quit in the fallout.Robinson, who has faced criticism for other inflammatory comments, has denied writing the messages more than a decade ago and has hired a law firm to investigate.Mount Airy, located about 100 miles (161km) north of Charlotte near the Virginia border, is where the late television star Andy Griffith grew up. The community served as the inspiration for the fictional town of Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show, which aired during the 1960s. City leaders have embraced that history with homages and festivals associated with the show. More

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      ‘I’m in Trouble Now’: North Carolinians Face Dangerous Floods From Helene

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      As the Swannanoa River swelled and overflowed from heavy rains brought by Helene, residents of Asheville, N.C., described moments of fear and anxiety amid dangerous flooding in their region.On Friday morning, Janetta Barfield, a 58-year-old nurse at a hospital in Asheville, managed to drive across a high bridge over the river after working a night shift. But then she was met with deep water on the other side of the bridge.She tried to drive through the road that had turned into a lake after seeing another car pass. “If he could do it, I could too,” she remembered thinking at the time.Instead, “I almost drowned,” she said in an interview on Friday — her S.U.V. stalled out, and water quickly seeped into her car and rose to her chest.“I’m in trouble now,” Mrs. Barfield thought to herself in the moment.As she sat in her car, a police officer “got me and pulled me across the water,” she said.After Mrs. Barfield was rescued, she walked down to the river’s edge three times to look for her car and saw box trucks, propane tanks and islands of trash floating in the water. But her S.U.V. was nowhere in sight.Across North Carolina, about 800,000 customers were without power Friday night, with the outages concentrated in western parts of the state. The Asheville Police Department put in place an overnight curfew until 7:30 a.m. on Saturday. The police did not immediately respond to requests for updates on damages and possible injuries or deaths.Asheville, a city of about 94,600, became something of a black hole for cell service on Friday. In the afternoon, about 50 people gathered by Buncombe County Public Library’s main branch in the city’s downtown to use its Wi-Fi.Miranda Escalante, a 38-year-old bartender, was there, trying to reach her family. She knew her sister in nearby Waynesville was safe, but couldn’t get in touch with her father in the community of Swannanoa, which also suffered from powerful floods.Not knowing how her father was faring was “very scary,” Ms. Escalante said. More

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      How JD Vance Turns Taking Questions Into the Show

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      He uses showdowns with reporters to cast himself as a pugnacious, unscripted defender of Donald J. Trump.“We’re a little behind on time, so I won’t take as many questions as I normally do,” the senator from Ohio said, before casually inviting local reporters to ask him whatever they’d like. “If you’ve got a microphone, just shout a question and I’ll answer it.”Usually, when candidates on the campaign trail take questions from the press, they do so before or after their events, far from the crowd. Vance holds gaggles like that, but he has also developed an unusual routine that has swiftly become a trademark of his campaign events: He has taken to parrying reporters’ questions in front of his voters — turning journalists into set pieces in a performance where he casts himself as former President Donald Trump’s pugnacious, unscripted defender while his raucous supporters tilt the playing field in his favor.That night, as Nick Ochsner, a reporter with the local broadcaster WBTV, began to speak — “I want to ask you about Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson,” he said, referring to the state’s embattled Republican candidate for governor — the crowd began to boo, drowning out Ochsner, who implored Vance’s supporters to let him finish. With a theatrical cough, Vance turned to the people behind him, well aware that they would share his exasperation.“I knew I’d get this,” Vance said, throwing one hand up with the air of a parent allowing a troublesome child to have his say, instead of a candidate for vice president answering a reasonable question.Ochsner pressed on, pointing out that Robinson, a Trump-endorsed candidate who campaigned alongside both Trump and Vance in happier times, wasn’t by Vance’s side after CNN reported that Robinson made lewd and racist comments on a pornography website.“Is there something disqualifying about the comments uncovered by CNN that wasn’t disqualifying about any of the previous comments he made?” Ochsner asked, as the crowd jeered some more.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The swing states in the south that could sway the election – podcast

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      Polling out this week suggests Kamala Harris could be outperforming Donald Trump in the crucial sun-belt states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina. So what happens if these polls are right? Can Donald Trump win the presidency without them?
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to George Chidi, politics and democracy reporter for Guardian US, about how these states could be be make or break for either candidate

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Vance, Declining to Denounce Robinson, Lashes Out at Media Instead

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      Senator JD Vance of Ohio lashed out at the news media on Monday as he campaigned in North Carolina, deflecting questions about a scandal engulfing the campaign of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the embattled Republican running for governor in the state.Mr. Vance, who has previously cast doubt on a CNN report linking Mr. Robinson to disturbing comments on a pornographic forum, avoided mentioning the lieutenant governor during a campaign rally in Charlotte. When pressed by journalists, he declined to denounce Mr. Robinson but said the onus would be on him to convince voters that he didn’t make the posts, in which the report says he called himself a “black NAZI” and defended slavery.“What he said or didn’t say is between him and the people of North Carolina,” said Mr. Vance, former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate. He added: “I’ve seen some of the statements. I haven’t seen them all. Some of them are pretty gross, to put it mildly. Mark Robinson says that those statements are false, that he didn’t actually speak them. So I think it’s up to Mark Robinson to make his case to the people of North Carolina that those weren’t his statements.”As audience members booed and jeered the local journalists asking Mr. Vance about Mr. Robinson, with many standing up in their seats and turning around to shout at the press gathered in the back of the venue, Mr. Vance shifted his focus there as well. “This entire episode illustrates something that is fundamentally broken about the American media,” Vance said, later comparing the gathered journalists to “supermarket tabloids” and adding “I really cannot believe that the American media is so much more focused on this than on the struggles of their fellow citizens.”But Mr. Vance brushed aside the questions about Mr. Robinson, some of which were drowned out as the crowd roared against them. He declined to say if the lieutenant governor still had the endorsement of the Trump campaign.Mr. Trump, for his part, has avoided mentioning Mr. Robinson in recent days, including at his own rally in the state on Saturday. The scandal surrounding Mr. Robinson presents a delicate challenge to Mr. Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” More

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      Top staffers on Mark Robinson campaign quit after reports of offensive remarks

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      Several top employees on Mark Robinson’s campaign to become North Carolina’s next governor have quit their posts after a media report found compelling evidence that the Republican candidate previously described himself as a black Nazi, spoke favorably of reinstating slavery and shared other disturbing thoughts on a porn message forum.The departures announced on Sunday include the campaign’s senior adviser, campaign manager and finance director, among others. “I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors,” Robinson said in a news release.One of the departing officials, Conrad Pogorzelski III, a senior adviser, helped Robinson win election as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor in 2020. Pogorzelski later became Robinson’s chief of staff and said that he “along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord”.The resignations came three days after CNN reported that Robinson had apparently authored porn forum posts which expressed a preference for Adolf Hitler over the president at the time, Barack Obama. He also reportedly called Martin Luther King Jr “worse than a maggot” and said he would “certainly buy a few” enslaved people if, as he wished, slavery were reinstated.Robinson denied that he was author of the posts and described them as “salacious tabloid lies”. He did not appear with Donald Trump at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday and avoided the subject during a campaign appearance later that day at a race track in Fayetteville.Polls show that Robinson is trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, in polls. But in a statement on Sunday, Robinson said that the surveys had “underestimated Republican support in North Carolina for several cycles”.“I am confident our campaign remains in a strong position to make our case to the voters and win” in the 5 November election, he added.Stein appeared on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union and asserted that Robinson was “utterly unqualified, unfit to be the governor of North Carolina”.Lindsey Graham, Republican US senator of South Carolina, said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that Robinson deserved a chance to defend himself against the reporting from CNN. But Graham called Robinson “a political zombie if he does not offer a defense to this that’s credible”.Senior state legislative leaders are concerned that any association with Robinson could affect their polling in November. Yet further up the political scale, those who on Sunday attended a rally in support of Donald Trump appeared to be unmoved, even as the former president endorsed Robinson as he pursues a return to the White House.Bob Judson, a 70-year-old unaffiliated voter, told the Washington Post he “didn’t put much credence” in the allegations against Robinson. “We’ve all done things in our past that we’re sorry for,” Judson said. “Some of the things are crazy.”Rose Cannon, 69, told the outlet that Robinson was a “very positive, strong man”.“Now that this has happened, I don’t know,” Cannon said. “We’ll hear through it, and see what we think.”While Trump has not responded to CNN’s claims about Robinson, his running mate, JD Vance, said it was better “to let these things play out sometimes in the court of public opinion”.Vance is due to hold a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday as the Republican presidential ticket hopes to move on from the Robinson episode. On Sunday, the Ohio US senator posted a comment on social media that sought to blame inflation on Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee, saying that was “my comment on Mark Robinson”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Top Aides Resign From Embattled North Carolina Candidate’s Campaign

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      Most of the senior staff members on Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor resigned on Sunday, dealing a seismic blow to the embattled Republican who has faced widespread criticism after an explosive CNN report that he had made a series of disturbing comments on a pornographic website.Among the resignations was his top campaign consultant, Conrad Pogorzelski III, who for years had been one of Mr. Robinson’s most loyal confidants and who had been the only consultant to take a chance on him during his run for lieutenant governor four years ago.Mr. Pogorzelski confirmed his resignation in a text message on Sunday evening, saying he and seven other campaign staffers had resigned on “our own accord.”The other resignations included Chris Rodriguez, the campaign manager; Heather Whillier, the finance director; and Jason Rizk, the deputy campaign manager. Two political directors, John Kontoulas and Jackson Lohrer, and the director of operations, Patrick Riley, also resigned.The 11th-hour shake-up in the campaign less than 50 days before the election will only exacerbate the troubles already plaguing Mr. Robinson, the fiery Trump acolyte who has been widely criticized for comments perceived as racist, antisemitic, transphobic and hateful.CNN reported on Thursday that Mr. Robinson had written on a porn site years ago that he was a “black NAZI,” that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography and that slavery was not bad. He also recounted on the site how he went “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a teenager. Mr. Robinson has denied that he wrote the posts and ignored calls from some fellow Republicans to withdraw from the race.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More