U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will campaign together in Georgia for the first time this week, aiming to reach the state’s southeast and offer a preview of their strategy in a key battleground state ahead of Election Day in November.
Few states will be more closely watched than Georgia for signs of how voters are responding to the campaign and the newly formed ticket, making it a fitting kickoff for Harris and Walz after the Democratic National Convention. Four years ago, President Joe Biden became the first Democrat to carry the state since Bill Clinton in 1992, winning by fewer than 12,000 votes.
As Harris and Walz begin their Peach State bus tour on Wednesday (28), they will make a rare trip through southern Georgia, a region that typically leans Republican but is where Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock found success in the 2022 Senate runoff.
“It’s a diverse coalition of voters that includes rural, suburban and urban Georgians, and it has a large population of African-American voters,” said Quentin Fulks, Harris’ deputy campaign manager. to CNN pointing to the campaign infrastructure in the state.
The campaign has 24 field offices in Georgia, including seven in the southern part of the state, with 50 full-time staff, according to a memo from Harris’ Georgia campaign state director Porsha White.
Fulks, who managed the campaign of Warnock, a U.S. senator, argued that Harris, like the congressman, has an advantage in appealing to larger groups of voters, including those in rural areas.
“We also see Donald Trump giving us the ability to do exactly the same thing we did when I was running Senator Warnock’s campaign, which is to turn out Republican voters,” Fulks added.
Harris campaign officials have repeatedly stressed that the presidential election will be a close race. In Georgia, that is clear. Recent polls from The New York Times and Siena College showed Trump leading among registered voters in Georgia, 51 percent to 44 percent.
But state Democratic strategists also see an opportunity.
“This is incredibly significant because rural Georgia is not a place where Democrats typically perform and it’s a place where Democrats have been struggling in the polls,” said Fred Hicks, a Georgia-based Democratic strategist. “In 2022, we see a new opportunity for Democrats.”
The Biden campaign, which has become the Harris campaign, has focused some of its organizational efforts on chipping away at Trump’s advantage in rural areas, swing states director Dan Kanninen told reporters last week.
“We need to lower the bar a little bit in rural America and not assume that we can’t speak to those voters — because that assumption has been very bad for us in the past, and suddenly we’re losing counties 80-20 instead of 60-40. So we have to show up in those places,” Kanninen said at an event hosted by Bloomberg.
He further said: “We are everywhere intent on having a permission structure to split votes wherever we can.”
Howard Franklin, another Democratic strategist in the state, agreed: “A big part of winning the state is not just winning big in metro Atlanta, but also reducing Republican margins of victory in rural counties.”
In the first week of her presidential campaign, Harris held a rally in Atlanta with thousands of attendees.
White, the Georgia state director, pointed to Forsyth and Fayette counties in the Atlanta metro area as places where Harris could gain ground, citing recent turnout at a Forsyth County “Weekend of Action” event that Trump won in 2020.
THE CNN Trump’s campaign has previously reported that it has become increasingly concerned about the state since Harris took over as the Democratic ticket leader. Trump recently sought to end a long-running feud with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a popular Republican, after publicly criticizing him at a rally.
Georgia was also at the center of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election with allegations of widespread voter fraud, though none was found.
On Monday (26), Democrats, with the support of Harris’ presidential campaign, filed a lawsuit to block controversial new election rules in Georgia, which they say could lead to post-election “chaos” in the state that is considered a presidential battleground for November.
Harris and Walz’s tour of southeast Georgia, which includes a mix of rural and urban stops, is expected to focus on issues close to voters’ hearts following a series of economy-related announcements this week. The bus tour will conclude with a rally in the Savannah area on Thursday (29), according to the campaign. Walz will not participate in the rally.
“On their bus tour, the Vice President and Governor Walz will engage directly with voters in their communities, similar to their bus tour of Western Pennsylvania that included stops at a campaign office and a high school football practice,” the campaign said in a statement, describing the Georgia effort as “critical” in its effort to reach a diverse coalition of voters.
Harris and Walz will also conduct an exclusive and highly anticipated joint interview with Dana Bash of CNN while in Georgia on Thursday, marking Harris’ first detailed and on-the-record conversation with a journalist since ascending to the top of the Democratic ticket.
The bus tour also offers an opportunity to present Walz, his military background and his days as a football coach as especially relevant to southern Georgia, according to Democratic strategists who cited his upbringing in rural America.
“If that moves the needle, you’ve got another play for Georgia,” Hicks said.
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This content was originally published in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz bet on campaign events in Georgia on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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