CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Something different is happening in North Carolina’s 2024 election: Republicans are eagerly showing up to vote early.

About 4 million people — more than half of those registered in the state — voted early in North Carolina, according to data from the State Board of Elections. And Republicans were beating both unaffiliated and Democratic voters headed into the final day of early voting, which wasn’t the case in either 2016 or 2020, according to the John Locke Foundation’s Vote Tracker.

What’s more, former President Donald Trump’s campaign is embracing early voting. At his Saturday rally in Gastonia, many attendees said they had already voted early.

Jason Little is a Statesville resident and volunteer for Trump Force 47, a network helping the former president’s 2024 campaign. The organization has made a big push this year for people to vote early.

On Saturday, Little volunteered at the rally in a Trump Force 47 T-shirt and a white baseball cap that said “Trump Force Captain,” with a Trump signature on the brim.

“You’re taking too much of a chance waiting till the day of, you know, anything can happen. You could be in a wreck. Your kid can have appendicitis or something, and you’ve lost, you know, your biggest right as a citizen to vote,” Little said. “That’s been our push is to make it too big to have any problems. And that’s been the message from the entire campaign the whole time is to vote early.”

As he spoke, the big screens behind Little’s head said, “Make a plan to vote! Mail/Absentee/Early in-person.”

But he isn’t fully on-board with early voting.

“You know, we’re not thrilled with the length of time of early voting,” Little said. “We don’t think it should be so long because that leaves opportunities for things to happen.”

A video before the rally also featured Trump warning voters they need to “swamp the polls” in order to prevent Democrats from “cheating,” repeating debunked claims that Joe Biden did not legally win the 2020 election.

“These people will cheat, and they do cheat,” he said. “We have to prevent what happened in 2020 from ever happening again.”

Some other voters shared Little’s reservations.

“I’m sort of old school,” said Laura Schnabel who came in from Lake Wylie, South Carolina, to attend her first Trump rally. “Let’s just have election day on one day, and this way there’s no fake, phony stuff.”

Schnabel said she and her husband voted this year by mail, a method the Trump campaign tried to restrict in 2020, since they recently moved from New York and would’ve struggled to register in South Carolina in time for the election.

“I don’t like to do that, but we had to do it,” she said.

When it came to Trump’s speech, he stuck to familiar talking points: immigration, the economy and an insufficient response from the federal government after Hurricane Helene.

Immigration

Trump promised to cut down on illegal immigration, claiming undocumented migrants are causing crime in the United States to rise.

“I will stop the invasion of massive numbers of criminals that have come into our country,” he said, claiming “thousands” of “murderers, rapists and convicted felons,” are entering the country’s southern border illegally.

There is no evidence that countries are emptying prisons and mental health facilities and sending people to the United States, as Trump has claimed.

Nationally, crime has fallen by 49% between 1993 and 2022, and again dropped by 3% between 2022 and 2023 – murder dropped by 11% that year alone – according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, Trump falsely claimed Saturday that many large cities don’t report their crime data to the FBI and were left out of its report.

But most large cities in the U.S., including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, reported their 2023 crime data to the FBI.

Rumors originally arose online that large cities weren’t reporting their crime data after the FBI changed it’s requirements in 2021, according to the website verifythis.com. Some law enforcement agencies, including those in large cities, didn’t report their 2021 crime data because they were unable to comply with the new FBI guidelines. But in 2022, the FBI made it easier for more agencies to participate. Over 85% of the nation’s law enforcement agencies – covering over 94% of the U.S. population – submitted crime data in 2023.

Western North Carolina and FEMA

Trump claimed the Federal Emergency Management Agency has failed to give sufficient aid to western North Carolina.

“You’ve been through a lot, and your government has not helped you too much,” he said, adding 50% of phone calls from western North Carolina to federal agencies in the wake of Helene went unanswered.

Federal call data reported by Politico show the government struggled in its disaster response, but officials say that is due to Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton hitting the nation’s coast in quick succession.

FEMA now has 21 disaster recovery centers in 39 counties in North Carolina, including a total 1.7 million households.

Jobs

Trump also cited a Friday report that job creation slowed sharply last month, with just 12,000 jobs created in the U.S. in October, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“One of the worst jobs reports of all time,” Trump said. “These are Depression numbers, I hate to tell you.”

The report came in well behind the around 100,000 new jobs economists expected and the worst since late 2020. However, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.

Economists credit the slowdown to strikes, including the nearly 44,000 workers taking part in the Boeing strike, and the effects of Hurricane Helene.

©2024 The Charlotte Observer. Visit charlotteobserver.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.