Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will begin a bus tour of southern Georgia next week, marking the first time they have campaigned together in the state and their first public events so far since the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The candidates will use the momentum from the conventions to carry them into the final months of the general election. In addition to the bus tour, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz are scheduled to record their first joint interview next week and appear at several fundraisers expected to take place in New York, California, Florida and Georgia, according to two sources familiar with the plans.
After the tour, Harris will hold a solo rally in Savannah, Georgia, her seventh visit to the state this year and her second since launching her presidential campaign last month.
“Our campaign in this part of the Peach State is critical because it represents a diverse coalition of voters that includes people living in rural, suburban and urban areas of Georgia, with a high proportion of Black voters and working-class families,” the Harris-Waltz campaign said in a release announcing the bus tour.
Harris and Walz’s visit comes as Republican candidates step up campaigning in the state. Vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio held a campaign event in Valdosta on Thursday following former President Donald Trump’s rally in Atlanta earlier this month. Republicans are also trying to capitalize on polling findings that suggest the party could win over a larger share of black and Latino voters in this election.
The southern Georgia bus tour is expected to be modeled after a campaign bus tour of western Pennsylvania earlier this month, which will include visits to local campaign offices, fire stations and high school football practices.
Harris and Walz had originally planned to visit Savannah during a campaign tour of battleground states earlier this month, but were forced to postpone the visit due to Tropical Storm Debby.
It’s unclear where Harris and Walz will go, but southern Georgia is home to some of the state’s largest black populations, including Dougherty County, which has the second-highest percentage of black residents in the state. The campaign has opened field offices in the predominantly black cities of Albany and Valdosta.
“South Georgia is a priority area for our campaign. We have seven offices in the region, including Valdosta, with nearly 50 full-time staff members. Since May 31, we have hosted more than 500 events in the region,” said Adelaide Block, spokesperson for the Harris Waltz Georgia campaign.
Lanada Robinson, research director at the New Georgia Project Foundation, said appealing to Black voters in both urban and rural areas will be crucial to Harris’ victory in Georgia, similar to Biden’s victory in 2020.
“Black voters are key to winning in Georgia. Of course, we can’t win just because of Black Georgians, but we certainly made 2020 what it was,” she said. “We had historic highs in turnout among Black voters, and we need that to happen again if we’re to win Georgia.”
Earlier this month, Harris held her second presidential rally in Atlanta, which featured Megan Thee Stallion and drew more than 10,000 people, her campaign said.
The campaign then began mobilizing in the state, and now has about 400,000 volunteers, 174 staff members, and 24 campaign offices across Georgia. The campaign is calling its grounds-on efforts in the state “the largest statewide operation of any Democratic presidential campaign in Georgia.”
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign chair, has identified Georgia as one of her key targets in the campaign, noting that changing demographics in the state could help the vice president expand his support from 2020.
“The vice president’s advantages with young voters, black voters and Latino voters will be important to multiple paths to the 270 electoral votes,” Dillon wrote in a recent memo.
Harris and Walz are also expected to pound battleground states around Labor Day, after which Harris will spend much of her time preparing for debates in preparation for her September showdown with Trump.
A Trump campaign adviser said he expected Harris to get a “boost” after the convention but likened it to a “sugar high” and did not believe it would change the overall landscape of the campaign.