When Hurricane Helene rolled through southeast Georgia less than three weeks before the start of early voting in this year’s presidential race, your humble scribe here at Trouble in God’s Country took a look at the map of the hardest-hit counties and wondered if the weather gods might be annoyed at Georgia Republicans.

As this map shows, the swath of largely rural 53 Georgia counties that earned the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) “individual assistance” designation as hard-hit counties voted overwhelmingly Republican in the 2020 presidential election — and have done the same in virtually every state, local and national election in recent memory.

Based on the final early voting data available at georgiavotes.com, Helene appears for the most part to have been a largely equal opportunity vote suppressor — although by my fuzzy algebra she did more damage in Republican-dominated counties.

But there can be little doubt that the storm absolutely put a big dent in voting in the state’s hardest-hit areas — those 53 counties approved by the FEMA for “individual assistance.” That designation made the 2.1 million Georgians living in those counties eligible for a wide range of federal support, including cash, housing and transportation.

Through the end of early voting on Friday, the voter turnout rate in those 53 counties was nearly six percentage points lower than in the other 106 counties outside the storm’s worst path of destruction. Voter turnout in those largely unaffected counties was 49.8% versus 43.9% in the 53 hardest-hit counties.

But you have to separate those 53 counties by party dominance to bring the political picture comes into focus — and to begin to suss out whether the storm hurt former Republican President Donald J. Trump more than Vice President Kamala Harris, the current Democratic nominee for the White House.

Of those 53 counties, 47 counties — nearly all sparsely populated rural counties — sided with Trump in the 2020 presidential race; Joe Biden won the other six, including the major population centers of Augusta and Savannah. At the end of early voting, turnout in the six Biden/Democratic counties stood at 40.5%. In the Trump/GOP counties, it was 45.9%.

But because Republicans voters outnumber Democrats so heavily across that 53 county region — 974,782 registered voters to 560,772 — the storm cost the GOP counties more votes than it did the Democratic counties.

(Obvious but important caveat: It’s impossible to know precisely how many Democratic versus Republican votes went uncast in each county during the early voting period, but my experience with these kinds of analyses is that the law of large numbers kicks in fairly early, and I’m willing to wager my math won’t be far off the mark.)

The table below summarizes the data I worked with. By my math, Helene robbed the six Democratic counties of more than 42,000 votes and the GOP counties of a little more than 60,000. Hence my calculation that the storm reduced the vote in the Republican counties by about 17,000 more than in the Democratic counties.

To build my estimate of the number of additional votes Democratic and Republican counties might have gained but for Helene, I multiplied total number of voters registered in the 53 “individual assistance” Democratic and Republican counties by the higher voter turnout rates each party generated in their share of the 106 counties outside the storm’s path.

To explain further: The early vote turnout in the 24 largely unaffected counties dominated by Democrats was 48.2% — a full eight points higher than in the six Democratic counties approved for “individual assistance.” Apply that higher turnout rate to the 560,772 registered voters in the six Democratic “individual assistance” counties and you’ll find nearly 43,000 more votes. Voter turnout in the 82 Republican counties outside the storm’s path was 52.1% — 6.2 points higher than the GOP counties in Helene’s path. Apply that rate to the 974,782 voters registered in those counties and you’ll turn up more than 60,000 additional votes.

Hence my calculation that the Republican counties lost about 17,000 more votes than the Democrats. President Biden, of course, defeated Trump by 11,799 votes in Georgia in 2020.

The big question heading into Tuesday’s General Election is whether these trends will continue? Or will voters who couldn’t make it to the polls during early voting go to the polls in higher numbers and close the gap created by Helene. Georgia’s 16 electoral votes — and perhaps the presidency — may hang in the balance.