Vice President Kamala Harris will embark on a two-day Georgia swing on Wednesday, and analysts say it’s wise to strike in the Southern swing state while she has momentum.
The Democratic presidential nominee is coming off what even some Republicans say was a successful national convention, with Donald Trump campaign aides contending any polling spike she gets this week is merely a political sugar high that will fade.
But Harris and her team have made clear they believe the Peach State, won by President Joe Biden in 2020, is in play again.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on Wednesday will begin a bus tour through south Georgia, which their campaign described in a statement as “critical” to the race against Trump. That’s because, the campaign said, the area “represents a diverse coalition of voters, including rural, suburban, and urban Georgians — with a large proportion of Black voters and working class families.”
The bus tour, which is expected to mirror one the Democratic duo conducted in Pennsylvania prior to their convention, is scheduled to culminate with a Thursday evening rally in Savannah. Harris intends to use the event to “lay out the stark choice facing voters in this election between Donald Trump’s dark and dangerous Project 2025 agenda and Vice President Harris’ optimistic and patriotic vision for a new way forward,” the campaign said.
Harris likely will focus on her economic and abortion access messages during the trip, including her convention vow to lower housing costs. To that end, her campaign on Tuesday unveiled a new ad, narrated by the nominee, in which she said of buying a home: “Sadly, right now, it is out of reach for far too many American families,” adding that Washington “should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable to buy a home, not less.”
Her housing plan calls for construction of 3 million new units, tax incentives for homebuilders to erect units for first-time buyers and other measures that Republicans have panned as too vague and too costly.
One former Democratic National Committee official described Georgia as a tactically wise first post-convention stop for Harris.
“I think she must put Georgia on the map. The Harris campaign message of freedom is catching fire with young, diverse voters,” Ivan Zapien, also a former senior Senate aide, said in an email. “Georgia’s electorate resets every four years and becomes more diverse by the minute.
“It’s a perfect match at the right time.”
Former Illinois Republican Rep. Joe Walsh, who went from a Trump supporter to a 2020 GOP primary foe and critic, said of Harris’ Georgia visit: “I think it makes a lot of sense because I truly believe, with her as the nominee, the map has expanded.
“Her campaign rightly feels pretty damn confident that Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are in play,” Walsh said in a Tuesday telephone interview, predicting that the swing would “once again show two diametrically opposed campaigns — Trump isn’t drawing the crowds he used to draw, and now he’s up against a candidate who’s putting 10,000 or 15,000 people into arenas.”
Still, one GOP pollster this week cautioned against Democrats becoming overconfident.
“Harris has surged a little over +3 points on average across swing states,” Frank Luntz wrote in a Monday X post, citing new polling conducted by The Washington Post, adding, “But she’s still losing in 4 of 7 swing states.”
An average of polls tabulated by the Post put Harris up, albeit narrowly, in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The same survey had Trump leading, also by thin margins, in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada.
‘It caught on like crazy’
Trump was in Detroit on Monday for a National Guard Association conference speech. He is due back on the campaign trail Thursday and Friday, with a town hall in Wisconsin and rally in Pennsylvania — both key battlegrounds. He spent some of his Monday remarks going after Harris and Biden.
“If you have a smart president, you’ll do fine,” Trump said, insinuating that Biden hasn’t been one and Harris would not be one before calling them both “incompetent.”
Trump also accused Harris of trying to take his proposal to get rid of taxes on tips.
“Every time I come in and say really bad things, they end up like I said, ‘No tax on tips.’ It caught on like crazy — no tax on tips,” Trump said to chuckles from the military audience. “This doesn’t affect you guys. You’re not big for tips. … You don’t need tips. But there are a lot of people that no tax on tips is a big deal.
“I went two, three months, and all of a sudden she’s making a speech,” he said. “It goes, ‘Oh, by the way, no tax on tips.’ It didn’t play well. But they do that.”
As Harris was prepping for a planned Sept. 10 debate with Trump and her Georgia swing, senior Trump campaign officials fired off a memo to colleagues advising them not to be surprised if Harris gets “a temporary 2 to 3 point bump” after last week’s Democratic National Convention.
“These bumps do not last,” the senior Trump officials wrote. “While the media is going to focus on the national polls, we need to keep our eye on the ball — that is the polling in our target states. Our goal is to get to 270 [Electoral College votes] and winning these states is how we do it. We’ll let the media make mountains out of molehills, while we keep driving forward.”
Giles Alston, an analyst for Oxford Analytica, wrote in a recent white paper that Harris’ successful convention “merely means the two candidates start the final stretch of the campaign on level terms, making their September debate the next crucial event.” (Oxford Analytica is owned by FiscalNote, which also is the parent company of CQ Roll Call.)
“Although Harris has turned Biden’s deficit in national polls into a marginal lead over Trump and drawn level in several battleground states, that reflects the enthusiasm that greeted her assumption of the candidacy,” Alston added. “However, as the party learned in 2016, a successful convention is no guarantee of a successful election outcome.”
The post Harris aims to expand electoral map with two-day Georgia bus tour, Savannah rally appeared first on Roll Call.
