The Democratic incumbent vice president and her running mate have set out on a two-day bus tour across southern Georgia, hoping to woo rural voters and notch another Democratic win in one of the swingiest of swing states, where just a few thousand voters could decide the presidential election.
The Harris-Walz duo is expected to meet with supporters, campaign staff, small business owners and voters before Harris caps the battleground swing with a rally in the Savannah area Thursday.
Harris plans to use the trip and rally to “lay out the stark choice facing voters in this election between Donald Trump’s dark and dangerous Project 2025 agenda and [her] optimistic and patriotic vision for a new way forward,” according to her campaign, which is already investing heavily in on-the-ground efforts in the state.
President Biden won Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes four years ago, and both of the state’s senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, are Democrats who won seats previously held by Republicans.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) recently summed up Georgia’s importance on former President Trump’s campaign to take back the White House, telling The Hill that he “can’t win without Georgia.”
“It’s mathematically possible, but if we don’t win Georgia, then we had a bad night because all the dynamics are there for us to reclaim Georgia,” he said.
Trump has a slight edge over Harris – up 2.7 percentage points in the state, but the gap has narrowed significantly since the vice president took the top of the Democratic ticket last month, according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ)’s polling index.
Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor who is a national co-chair for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a recent TV appearance that the team is “a hundred percent” committed to carrying Georgia this fall.
“We really think that we have a chance to win Georgia,” Landrieu said Sunday on MSNBC. “They’re going to compete there in a very hard way.”
After 2020’s narrow win for Democrats, Georgia became ground zero for allegations of election manipulation.
Trump currently faces multiple charges in Georgia for his alleged efforts to upend his 2020 election loss there, while several lawsuits that sought to overturn the results have failed.
