WASHINGTON — The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene has brought climate change to the forefront of the presidential campaign after the issue lingered on the margins for months.

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled Wednesday to Georgia to see hard-hit areas, two days after her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, was in the state and criticized the federal response to the storm.

Thousands of people in the Carolinas still lack running water, cellphone service and electricity.

President Joe Biden toured some of the hardest- hit areas Wednesday and Thursday.

“Nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis any more,” Biden said at a briefing in Raleigh, North Carolina, the state capital. “They must be brain dead if they do.”

Harris, meanwhile, hugged and huddled with a family in hurricane-ravaged Augusta, Georgia.

“There is real pain and trauma that resulted because of this hurricane’’ and its aftermath, Harris said outside a storm-damaged house with downed trees in the yard. “We are here for the long haul.”

The focus on the storm — and its link to climate change — is notable because climate change was lightly mentioned in two presidential debates this year. The candidates instead focused on abortion rights, the economy, immigration and other issues.

The hurricane featured prominently in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate as Republican Sen. JD Vance and Democrat Gov. Tim Walz were asked about the storm and the larger issue of climate change.

Both men called the hurricane a tragedy and agreed on the need for a strong federal response. But it was Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who put the storm in the context of a warming climate.

“There’s no doubt this thing roared onto the scene faster and stronger than anything we’ve seen,” he said.

Bob Henson, a meteorologist and writer with Yale Climate Connections, said it was no surprise that Helene is pushing the federal disaster response and human-caused climate change into the campaign conversation.

“Weather disasters are often overlooked as a factor in big elections,” he said. “Helene is a sprawling catastrophe, affecting millions of Americans. And it dovetails with several well-established links between hurricanes and climate change, including rapid intensification and intensified downpours.”

More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast in the past week, an amount that if concentrated in North Carolina would cover the state in 3 1/2 feet of water.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

During Tuesday’s debate, Walz credited Vance for past statements acknowledging that climate change is a problem. But he noted that Trump has called climate change “a hoax” and joked that rising seas “would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in.”

Summer 2024 sweltered to Earth’s hottest on record, making it likely that this year will end up as the warmest humanity has measured, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

Global records were shattered last year as human-caused climate change, with a temporary boost from an El Niño, keeps dialing up temperatures and extreme weather, scientists said.

Vance, an Ohio senator, said he and Trump support clean air and clean water and “want the environment to be cleaner and safer.”

However, during Trump’s four years in office, he took a series of actions to roll back more than 100 environmental regulations.

Vance sidestepped a question about whether he agrees with Trump’s statement that climate change is a hoax.

“What the president has said is that if the Democrats — in particular Kamala Harris and her leadership — really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America. And that’s not what they’re doing,” he said.

“This idea that carbon (dioxide) emissions drives all of the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true just for the sake of argument. So we’re not arguing about weird science. If you believe that, what would you want to do?” Vance asked.

The answer, he said, is to “produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.”