Harris barnstorms battleground Georgia as US campaign sprint starts

Democratic presidential candidate US Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, pose with members of the marching band during a visit at Liberty County High School in Hinesville, Georgia, August 28, 2024, as they travel across Georgia for a 2-day campaign bus tour. (AFP)

SAVANNAH, Georgia – US Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on a bus tour of Georgia on Wednesday as Democrats try to harness a surge of enthusiasm and put the swing state back in play in November’s election against Donald Trump.

President Joe Biden had been on course to lose the state he flipped from Republican Trump in 2020, but since Harris replaced Biden as candidate five weeks ago, the party has begun to hope it could win it again.

Both Harris and Trump are now ramping up their campaigns in seven key battleground states as an extraordinary — and now super-short — White House race enters its final 10-week sprint.

“We’re seizing on the energy and putting in the work to win again in 2024,” Harris’s campaign said.

Riding a wave of energy from the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris and running mate Tim Walz are traveling through southern parts of Georgia on a two-day bus tour.

The blitz is focused on Black and working class voters and will culminate with a Harris rally in Savannah on Thursday.

The 59-year-old Harris then faces a critical test on the same day when she sits down for her first interview since starting her campaign, in a joint appearance on CNN with Walz.

Republicans have criticized her for not facing media scrutiny sooner, and Trump spokesman Jason Miller accused her on Wednesday of using Walz as a “human shield.”

But Harris has been content to let her campaign do the talking in the frenetic five weeks since the 81-year-old Biden stunned the country by bowing out.

She has reinvigorated the Democratic Party, raised more than half a billion dollars and wiped out Trump’s lead in the polls.

The Harris campaign also launched a huge television ad campaign Wednesday with a gravel-voiced narrator warning that Trump is “back, and he’s out for control” with a radically conservative manifesto.

‘Dangerously liberal’

Harris insists however that she remains the underdog, and that the election will be won or lost in the battleground states.

In the last days of Biden’s campaign, increasingly poor polls showed his only real remaining hope of victory was through winning 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 as a way to give her multiple ways to win the overall Electoral College vote.

Georgia is a particularly tough target. Biden won it by a razor-thin margin of less than 12,000 votes in 2020, in a result that Trump bitterly contested.

The Republican now faces criminal charges in Georgia related to his alleged plot to overturn that vote.

But Trump is also stepping up his swing state campaign as he seeks to recover his poise after being wrong-footed by the sudden Democratic switch from Biden to Harris.

The vice president is not only two decades younger than Trump and of Black and South Asian heritage, but vying to be the first female US president.

Trump will be attacking Harris’s “dangerously liberal policies” in Michigan and Wisconsin on Thursday, before traveling to Pennsylvania on Friday, his campaign said.

But his campaign was embroiled in controversy Wednesday after a report that his entourage shoved and verbally abused staff during a politicized visit to the United States’ most hallowed resting place for its war dead.

National Public Radio reported that the incident happened when an Arlington National Cemetery official tried to prevent Trump’s aides from taking images in a section for those killed in recent wars, where filming and staging of political events is banned.