Photo by Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images. 
 
 Hurricane Sandy has yet to make landfall in the United States, but it's already impacting next week's election. 
 
 Josh Voorhees Josh Voorhees is a Slate senior writer. He lives in Iowa City. 
 
 For starters, it has forced President Obama and Mitt Romney to rework their carefully planned campaign schedules, and election officials in Maryland and the District of Columbia to temporarily suspend early voting. 
 
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 While it's obviously too early to say for certain just how much the storm could impact early voting between the East Coast and the Great Lakes, it doesn't exactly take a giant leap to imagine a scenario where the answer to that question is somewhere between "some" and "a whole lot." If nothing else, the storm is providing one final unscripted moment for a campaign that appeared to be largely in auto-drive heading into the final week. 
 
 But what about what the storm will do to voters' psyches? For an answer to that question, we point you to this 2011 paper from Boston University's Andrew Reeves and Carnegie Mellon's John Gasper: "Make It Rain? Retrospection and the Attentive Electorate in the Context of Natural Disasters." (h/t Mother Jones' Adam Serwer) 
 
 
 
 Here's the summary, emphasis ours: 
 
 Are election outcomes driven by events beyond the control of politicians? Democratic accountability requires that voters make reasonable evaluations of incumbents. Although natural disasters are beyond human control, the response to these events is the responsibility of elected officials. In a county-level analysis of gubernatorial and presidential elections from 1970 to 2006, we examine the effects of weather events and governmental responses. We find that electorates punish presidents and governors for severe weather damage. However, we find that these effects are dwarfed by the response of attentive electorates to the actions of their officials. When the president rejects a request by the governor for federal assistance, the president is punished and the governor is rewarded at the polls. The electorate is able to separate random events from governmental responses and attribute actions based on the defined roles of these two politicians. 
 
 And a little more detail from later in the paper (pg. 351): 
 
 "[P]residents are punished for severe weather damage. For example, $20,000 in weather damage in a county of 10,000 voters would result in a modest decrease of a quarter point in the two-party popular vote. This finding also holds even when accounting for a federal response to weather damage. In all specifications of the model we find evidence supporting a responsive electorate and our retrospection of outcomes hypothesis. Even though electorates reward politicians for taking action, they also punish the incumbent for so-called acts of God. The model also shows that presidents receive an electoral boost for disaster declarations, but one that is substantially smaller than the one received by the governor." ||||| The presidential campaigns are publicly hitting pause on East Coast electioneering as Hurricane Sandy spirals toward Atlantic beaches, but privately political professionals are starting to assess important questions about how it might affect next week’s elections up and down the ballot. 
 
 For obvious reasons — namely, that they don’t want to appear to make political hay out of a life-and-death act of nature — campaign officials won’t touch the prospective political aftermath of a storm that has yet to hit. 
 
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 reset Obama briefs on Sandy preparations Sandy brings yard signs danger 
 
 (PHOTOS: Hurricane Sandy) 
 
 “Governor Romney’s concern is the safety and well-being of those in the path of this storm, not political considerations,” said Andrea Saul. Obama’s team wouldn’t talk about the ramifications on Sunday night. 
 
 But that doesn’t mean campaigns aren’t worried. Come hell or high water — and likely both — the nation will choose a president next Tuesday, and Sandy could wreak havoc on the election. 
 
 Here are the answers to five questions about Sandy’s impact on the election: 
 
 1) Will Mitt Romney’s momentum be stopped? 
 
 It’s hard to see how the storm helps. The Republican nominee has more than closed the gap with the incumbent over the final weeks of the campaign, taking a slim lead in most national polls. But his national boost hasn’t been mirrored in two pivotal states: Ohio and Virginia. Already Romney had to scrap a full day’s worth of events in Virginia Sunday. 
 
 Obama has had to change his schedule, too, but he’s not the one trying to make up ground. 
 
 (PHOTOS: Political plans: Rock me like a hurricane) 
 
 And even though there are multiple schools of thought on how Sandy could affect voters’ feelings about the candidates or the nuts and bolts of getting folks to turn out, it’s still hard to see how the storm could help Romney. That is, unless the government botches the response and voters blame Obama. 
 
 There’s one practical problem: travel. The storm will make it difficult for Romney to make the final push in states affected by the storm including Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire. He does plan to visit Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio Monday — also critical states. “Romney still has ground to make up in several swing states where the race has not budged,” one Democrat told POLITICO. “So to the degree it impacts travel — canceling trips to places like New Hampshire — makes it hard to make up the gap.” 
 
 2) Does Obama have a natural advantage because he’s president? 
 
 The short answer: yes. The longer answer: not if he makes an unforced error. While George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina ranks among the worst blunders in modern presidential history, it has also ensured that no president or candidate will under-react to the threat of a devastating natural disaster. 
 
 As president, Obama’s best politics are to simply do his job well. On Sunday, he visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters for a briefing, which is pictured prominently on the White House website. The president, in suit and shirt with no tie, sits between FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate and Deputy Administrator Richard Serino.
– President Obama is assuring Americans that there has been "extraordinarily close coordination" between state, local, and federal officials in the response to Hurricane Sandy, he said in a press conference this afternoon. But "millions of people are going to be affected," he cautioned. "The most important message that I have for the public right now is please listen to what your state and local officials are saying. When they tell you to evacuate, you need to evacuate." At the end of the press conference, a reporter asked what impact the storm might have on the election. "I am not worried at this point about the impact on the election, I'm worried about the impact on families," first responders, the economy, and transportation, Obama said. "The election will take care of itself next week." Of course, lots of people are worried about the impact on the election. Slate points to a study showing that the public tends to "punish the incumbent for so-called acts of God." Nate Silver reads the studies differently, saying they indicate that a well-run response can help an incumbent. But the storm, he notes, will also wreak havoc on polling.