Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are at risk of being elbowed out of the news cycle by a powerful hurricane churning toward the Southeast coast and threatening to barrel into two of their most important battlegrounds: Florida and North Carolina.

But the Clinton camp is refusing to be completely shut out of the conversation: Her team is buying airtime on the Weather Channel in a slew of major Florida media markets.


Clinton is seeking to appeal directly to swing-state voters potentially in the path of Hurricane Matthew and will spend $63,000 to reach Weather Channel viewers there for five days beginning on Thursday, according to a source monitoring TV ad buys. Hurricane Matthew is currently forecast to approach the Florida East Coast late Thursday or on Friday.

It’s a risky proposition. The potential human and economic toll of major storms makes for one of the trickiest decisions of all for presidential campaigns: how to derive political benefit from natural disaster — or simply respond at all — without seeming to exploit real suffering.

The Weather Channel, unsurprisingly, gets a spike in viewership during natural disasters — and not just in the affected areas. Viewers across the country tend to tune in to watch storm footage. That might help explain parallel ad buys the Clinton campaign placed in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire that also coincide with Hurricane Matthew’s potential landfall. Trump and candidates for other offices have also advertised on the Weather Channel this year.

The new Clinton ads — a small sliver of a larger cable purchase in multiple swing states, which includes just-placed ads during postseason baseball games — appear to be an attempt to salvage some share of the conversation in the run-up to Sunday’s second presidential debate. The campaign was forced by the storm Wednesday to cancel a planned Florida trip by President Barack Obama, and they’re likely to lose multiple news cycles as residents grapple with storm recovery efforts in Florida, North Carolina and neighboring states that are less competitive electorally.

"Over the past few days, our campaign made millions of dollars of adjustments and refinements to our TV buys on dozens of different cable stations in markets all across the battleground states," said Clinton campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson. "The Weather Channel represented less than one percent of that spending. These shifts were part of our regular updates to maximize efficiency, effectiveness and reach of our ad buy."

Matthew could scramble the election in other ways, too. Both campaign operations in those two states are likely to be inactive as volunteers, staffers and their families shelter and recover from the storm. And in Florida, while South Florida should avoid a direct hit, the storm could skirt some of the Democratic strongholds where turnout will be essential to the Clinton-Kaine ticket.

“You need to strike a balance between looking presidential but not looking like you’re a politically crass politician who’s parachuting in for a photo-op,” said Ryan Williams, who advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

When an incumbent president is on the ballot — as Barack Obama was in 2012 when the remnants of Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast or George W. Bush was when a string of storms hammered Florida in 2004 — the benefit is clear. Presidents are obligated to helm disaster responses, coordinating with local officials and exercising their executive authority in very visible ways.

“Certainly there’s an effect that occurs when a chief executive is looking like a chief executive at a time of crisis,” said Brett Doster, who advised Bush’s reelection campaign in Florida. “You just can’t divorce politics from it.”

Doster said Bush presided during a string of brutal hurricanes in 2003 and 2004, while his brother Jeb was in the governor’s mansion there. Both worked intensely to depoliticize their handling of the storm, he said — and the result was mutual political benefit. Then-President Bush made gains in Florida, a linchpin in his reelection, and Jeb Bush earned high marks for storm management, which became a selling point in his ill-fated 2016 presidential bid.

Whether Trump or Clinton can demonstrate presidential leadership during a storm response is less clear, since neither has an official role. More likely, strategists said, eyes will turn to Obama and Florida Gov. Rick Scott — each of whom has become a prominent surrogate for their preferred candidate.

“The two candidates are going to have to be very careful because there’s a tremendous risk if it looks like they’re politicizing it in the least,” Doster said.

Kevin Cate, a veteran Florida strategist who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign said a Clinton ad campaign in Florida could be positive if it takes the proper tone. “As long as the paid media is not overtly insulting or negative, I think it’s smart to communicate a message of hope and optimism, but not run the traditional kind of negative slash and burn,” he said. He added that both campaigns need to be mindful that voters who lose power — potentially more than a million along the Florida coast — will be getting most of their news via social media through their phones.

Trump has already made an issue of Clinton’s decision to eschew Louisiana earlier this year after severe flooding. He traveled to the area to survey the damage and declared it a display of presidential leadership to get an on-the-ground perspective, even as some Democrats described his visit as a distraction that detracted from recovery efforts. And during a tumultuous period of protests in North Carolina following a police shooting of an African-American man, Clinton was forced to cancel a planned trip to Charlotte when local officials warned it would divert resources from managing the crisis.

Trump may have a business reason to get involved in this case — his Mar-a-Lago property, just south of Palm Beach, sits in one of the highest-risk zones for the hurricane’s impact, with forecasts calling for some of the most extreme winds of all.

Steve Schale, who ran Obama’s 2008 Florida campaign, said disaster response is always dicey for nonincumbent candidates. “There is no perfect road map for these things, and when I have been in decision-making positions, I always err on the side of caution,” he said. “While guys like me think about the politics of everything, you have to repress those instincts, and let basic common sense prevail, and most importantly, encourage your clients to stay in their lane.”

Schale said the campaign pulled TV ads and scaled back operations when storms approached.

“The last thing a voter trying to evacuate wants to do is hear from an overambitious campaign,” he said. Candidates could instead use their platforms, he added, to direct residents’ attention to shelters and public guidance.

Republicans also have painful memories of the response to Sandy, which occurred a week before Election Day. Obama, who appeared to have a narrow edge in the race in those final few days, traveled to New Jersey and was met by the warm embrace of Gov. Chris Christie — a display of bipartisan comity that some Republicans credit with widening Obama’s lead.

“When you’re the incumbent, you have official duties to carry out. You have to go down, meet with the victims,” said Ryan Williams, who advised Romney’s 2012 campaign. “It helps a politician’s effort if they’re doing it well. Incumbent politicians have a great deal to gain politically by effectively responding to a significant storm.”

Steve Lonegan, a former New Jersey mayor who ran Ted Cruz’s 2016 operation in the state, lamented that Obama benefited politically from his handling of Sandy. And he worried a similar response effort by Obama would play to Clinton’s benefit.

“If Obama visits the impacted states he will appear with Republican governors in Florida and North Carolina,” he said, despite his role as a “cheerleader” for Clinton. “Trump has to make these visits. As the possible next president in just a few months he will be expected to show what he is made of in these circumstances. And since Obama is Hillary’s surrogate he is entitled to respect for showing concern.”

It’s been nearly 11 years since a major hurricane made landfall in the United States. The last storm, Hurricane Wilma — which made landfall along Florida’s southwest Gulf Coast in October 2005 as a Category-3 storm — killed five people in Florida, knocked out power to nearly all South Florida residents and caused $21 billion in damage. (Sandy in 2012 lost hurricane status about an hour before barreling into the New Jersey coast.)

As of 5 p.m. Eastern Time, Matthew was bearing down on the Bahamas with maximum sustained winds of 120 mph. The Category-3 storm has already prompted Hurricane warnings for the Atlantic coast of Florida from just north of Miami up the coast to north of Daytona Beach. The Atlantic coasts of Northern Florida and Georgia are under a Hurricane Watch.

The forecast for Matthew still contains considerable uncertainty. The storm could make landfall anywhere on the Atlantic coast from South Florida northward to the North Carolina Outer Banks. Or it could skirt the coast without the center crossing over land at all.

The current forecast track places the center of Hurricane Matthew near the Central Florida coast late Thursday night into Friday, with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph. Even if the storm center doesn’t make landfall in Florida, residents there can expect conditions to deteriorate during the day on Thursday, with hurricane conditions possible by Thursday night.

Based on the storm’s forecast strength — a low Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale — a direct landfall could produce “catastrophic” damage for coastal regions.

After crossing or skirting the Florida coast, Matthew is forecast to move north and east along the U.S. coast, potentially affecting the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. The longer-term track of Matthew is even more uncertain – but some computer projections suggest the storm, after moving farther offshore this weekend, could even loop back toward the coast next week.