Taking advantage of last week’s star hour in Chicago, Harris and vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz are heading to a battleground they see as important.
With former Republican President Trump also ramping up his campaign in a string of swing states that will decide the race for the White House, the Nov. 5 presidential election promises to be painfully tight.
But after Mr. Biden swayed Georgia for the first time in three decades in 2020, “we’re taking that energy and recruiting it to win again in 2024,” Harris’ campaign said.
On Wednesday, Harris’ campaign also launched a massive television ad campaign featuring a dramatic voice-over narrator warning that Trump is “back and wants to rule” with a radical conservative manifesto.
Harris and Walz plan to appeal to predominantly black and working-class voters in rural south Georgia during their bus tour.
On Thursday, K. Harris will give his first interview since the start of his campaign; the two will appear on CNN with Walz, and later she will hold a rally of her own in Savannah, Georgia.
The 59-year-old vice president has revitalized the Democratic Party in five feverish weeks since Mr. Biden, 81, dropped out of the race amid concerns over his age.
But while Harris has started to pull ahead of Trump in the polls, she still believes she is the underdog.
Her visit to Georgia, which Mr. Biden won by a slim margin of less than 12,000 votes in 2020, reflects her campaign’s determination to keep all paths to victory open.
In the final days of Mr. Biden’s campaign, declining poll results indicated that his only realistic hope of victory was victory in the three “rust belt” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Harris is now also targeting the four Sun Belt states of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina to give her a better chance of winning a majority of Electoral College votes.
“The Human Shield”
Trump, who faces criminal charges in Georgia for allegedly plotting to alter the results of the 2020 election, is also ramping up his campaign in swing states.
He will attack Harris’ “dangerously liberal politics” in Michigan and Wisconsin on Thursday and travel to Pennsylvania on Friday, his staff said.
His campaign was embroiled in controversy on Wednesday after his entourage reportedly shoved and verbally abused workers during a politicized visit to the US’s most revered war memorial.
National Public Radio reported that the incident occurred when an official at Arlington National Cemetery tried to prevent Trump aides from taking photos in the section where victims of recent wars are buried because filming and political events are prohibited there.
Trump, 78, is trying to get back on track after being caught off guard by the Democrats’ sharp swing from Biden to Harris, who is not only two decades younger, black and South Asian, but is also in the running to become the first female US president. .
His campaign has spent a lot of time berating Harris for not giving interviews since the start of her campaign.
Trump aide Jason Miller criticized her for only agreeing to a joint interview with CNN, accusing her of using Walz as a “human shield.”
The two sides also clashed over the first debate, which is scheduled for less than two weeks later, on September 10.
Trump said Tuesday that he had “reached an agreement” for the debate amid a dispute over whether the candidates’ microphones would be turned off when the other candidate spoke, but the Harris campaign did not confirm that there was such an agreement.
2024-08-29 03:26:28