Harris and Walz travel by bus in rural Georgia to reach out to voters in GOP strongholds

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, kicked off a two-day bus tour in Georgia on Wednesday, snaking through rural areas in the southern part of the state before culminating in a big rally in the coastal city of Savannah.

Campaign officials believe that in order to win the critical battleground state over Republican Donald Trump in November, they need more than Atlanta and the suburbs that delivered for Joe Biden in 2020 and must make inroads, however small, in GOP strongholds.

Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said the bus tours offer an “opportunity to get to places we don’t usually go (and) make sure we’re competing in all communities.”

Tyler said the campaign’s strategy of using informal engagements to reach voters has been consistent from when President Biden was on the ticket, but the nature of the events has shifted along with the candidates. During a bus tour in Western Pennsylvania, for example, they stopped at a football practice — Walz is a former assistant high school football coach.

In southeast Georgia, the Democratic ticket was visiting Liberty County High School and small businesses — and also stopping at campaign offices to thank volunteers.

The campaign wants the events to motivate voters in GOP-leaning areas who don’t traditionally see the candidates, but also hopes that the engagements drive viral moments that cut through crowded media coverage to reach voters across the country.

The stops are meant as moments where voters can learn “not just what they stand for, but who they are as people,” Tyler said.

Walz met Harris on the tarmac in Savannah and the two greeted students from Savannah State University before setting off in their bright blue bus with red and white accents, “Harris Walz” emblazoned in big letters on the side along with the phrase “A New Way Forward.”

It looks like a regular campaign bus, but this one is an armored U.S. Secret Service vehicle driven by agents that comes with lights and sirens and secure communications.

In addition to the bus tour and the Thursday rally, Harris and Walz will be sitting down with CNN anchor Dana Bash for their first joint interview. The interview will air Thursday night.

The Georgia trip is a makeup visit from earlier in the month when the duo was set to embark on a seven-state swing tour introducing the new Democratic ticket. The North Carolina and Georgia legs of the trip got scrapped as Tropical Storm Debby battered the region.

The Democratic strategy to peel off votes in Republican parts of the state has had some success before. Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first Black senator, won reelection in 2022 by nearly 3 percentage points — while Joe Biden carried Georgia by only a quarter percentage point about two years earlier — in part by venturing into the deepest red areas, driven in part by operatives who are now on Harris’ campaign team.

Harris has another campaign blitz on Labor Day with President Biden in Detroit and Pittsburgh with the election just over 70 days away. The first mail ballots get sent to voters in just two weeks.

In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp seems to have moved past Trump’s blistering attacks against him at a rally in the state just a few weeks ago, saying it was a “small distraction that’s in the past.”

On the eve of Harris’ visit, Kemp told Fox News: “I’m not sure exactly what happened going into the rally. I’ve seen a lot of different stories and people’s explanations of what happened.”

At the rally, Trump tore into the governor, blaming him for his narrow 2020 loss in the state. In a roughly 10-minute tirade, Trump railed against Kemp for not giving in to his false theories of election fraud. He also blamed the governor for not stopping a local district attorney from prosecuting him and others for their efforts to overturn the results in the state.

Trump changed his tune last week, thanking the governor in a social media post for all his “help and support in Georgia, where a win is so important to the success of our Party and, most importantly, our Country.”

Kemp said on Fox that Republicans “need to be telling people why they should vote for us, what we’re going to do to make things better than they are right now. And there’s a host of issues that I think you could contrast Kamala Harris and her record.”

“To me, that’s what we need to stay focused on, not some dustup from two or three weeks ago.”

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign launched a new ad across the battleground states, seeking to tie Trump to the conservative “Project 2025.”

The first ad asserts that Trump is “out for control” over voters, juxtaposing Trump quotes with ominous screenshots of the plan. It’s part of Harris’ $370 million in digital and television ad reservations between Labor Day and Election Day.

Led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a detailed 920-page handbook for governing under the next Republican administration, including ousting thousands of civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists and reversing the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medications used in abortions.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, though it was drafted by longtime allies and former officials of the Trump administration. Last month, he posted on social media that he had not seen the plan, had “no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”