Washington ? Once Hurricane Charley is gone from Florida, it’s a safe bet President Bush will sweep in. Natural calamities present political opportunity, and many crucial electoral votes are in the path of Charley’s howling winds.

Bush swiftly issued a disaster declaration to expedite federal aid as Charley tore into the Florida Gulf Coast on Friday. He was acting on a request that had come from his brother Jeb, the governor, even before the ferocious storm made landfall. The president was expected to visit the area in the aftermath.

Officials are loath to ascribe campaign motives to emergency response, but politics infuses everything this close to an election. No more so than in the state that handed Bush the presidency.

“This provides both opportunities and real dangers for the president,” said Dario Moreno, a Florida International University political scientist who was safe from the storm in Miami.

Presidents are measured by the aid and sympathy that follow a big hit from nature, and Moreno said Bush stood to gain as long as he treated the emergency as more than a chance to roll up his sleeves and clear a bit of rubble for the cameras.

“If he looks like he’s doing this for a photo opportunity, it’s going to backfire on him,” he said. “He has to make sure FEMA and the emergency aid responders are working around the clock and without a hitch.”

The hurricane bore down not only on the scene-stealing state of the last election, but one of the most dynamic parts of it: the western and central counties where parties are in heated competition for the tens of thousands of non-Cuban Hispanics who have moved there since 2000. Florida offers 27 electoral votes, the fourth-biggest prize.

For Bush, lessons of disaster politics are close to home.

His father’s political advisers were caught flat-footed at a similar point of the campaign cycle, August 1992, when Hurricane Andrew wreaked havoc in Florida. Thousands went without shelter and other necessities for days while the magnitude of the storm slowly sank in.

The first President Bush was roundly criticized for overseeing a by-the-formula response to extraordinary needs. He visited the area, but his administration declined an initial appeal to send a military engineering brigade and other troops for the relief effort and stumbled over disaster aid.

Barring an obviously inept performance from the White House, disasters inoculate presidents from campaign criticism for a time because opponents can’t be seen as trying to capitalize on people’s misfortune.

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, for example, won’t let himself be seen as begrudging Floridians federal relief dollars no matter how generous, analysts say.

“Kerry is best to be silent on the issue — it’s territory he doesn’t need to go into,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a University of Pennsylvania presidential campaign scholar.