Former president Barack Obama will crisscross the battleground states for Kamala Harris, with a kickoff in all-important Pennsylvania next week, according to a senior Harris campaign official.
Obama will hold his first event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania next Thursday, the beginning of a blitz across the handful of rust belt and sun belt states that will probably decide the 2024 election.
Obama will be appearing in the swing state after Republican nominee Donald Trump returns on Saturday to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where he survived an assassination attempt in July.
Obama remains one of the Democrats most powerful surrogates, second perhaps only to his wife, Michelle Obama. His return to the campaign trail follows a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, in which he cast Harris as a forward-looking figure and a natural heir to his diverse, youth-powered political coalition.
“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told the convention in August. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter.”
Harris was one of Obama’s earliest supporters when he launched a long-shot presidential bid against Hillary Clinton in 2007. She would go on to knock on doors for him ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008.
Harris’s campaign already includes several former Obama campaign staff, including strategist David Plouffe, Stephanie Cutter – who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 – and Mitch Stewart, Obama’s grassroots strategist for both campaigns. Stewart is Harris’s adviser for battleground states, among which Pennsylvania is a must-win for either side.
Key to winning Pennsylvania could be winning the Latino vote. About 90,000 Latino voters might still be undecided, according to Penn State professor, A K Sandoval-Strausz, writing in the Conversation, who argues that an endorsement for Harris from Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny could have a greater impact on the election than Taylor Swift’s. In 2020, Biden won the state by 80,000 votes – or a single point. In 2016, Trump took the state with just 44,292 votes.
According to the latest average of Pennsylvania polling from the Hill/Decision Desk HQ, Harris leads Trump by just 0.9 points in the state.
