WASHINGTON– Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz embarked on a bus tour of southwestern Pennsylvania on Sunday, hoping to ride a wave of enthusiasm for their candidacy and get to their party’s nominating convention in Chicago this week.
Vice President Harris and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, were joined by their spouses, Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, as they made their first stop to visit local volunteers making calls at a campaign office in the Beaver County community of Rochester, which was won by Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee in 2020. The stop came exactly four weeks after President Joe Biden withdrew his re-election bid and endorsed Harris as his successor.
Harris and Walz sat at the tables and made a few calls, as did their spouses.
“79 days left, Hannah,” Harris said on the phone.
At another point while we were on the phone, she said, “We’re all in the same boat.”
Walz hung up, said of the caller, “He’s all in,” and gave a thumbs up. He called again and asked the person on the other end of the line, “How are you? What are you hearing from people?”
Southwest Pennsylvania is a key part of a crucial swing state that has long drawn the attention of presidential candidates. The state voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Both Harris and Trump are vying to see who can put Pennsylvania in their column on November 5.
Most polls, including those from the New York Times and Siena College and Fox News, find that Harris and Trump will be neck and neck nationwide.
Trump held a rally in Wilkes-Barre in the northeast of the state on Saturday, after attending rallies in Harrisburg and Butler in July, where he survived an assassination attempt.
The bus trip is Harris’ eighth trip to Pennsylvania this year and her second this month. The vice president announced on Aug. 6 that Walz would be her running mate, just hours before their first joint appearance as candidates later that day in Philadelphia.
They arrived at Pittsburgh International Airport with their spouses on Sunday morning and greeted their supporters. The four held hands and raised their arms together before cheering on their supporters who were holding campaign signs.
They then boarded a bright blue bus with “Harris Walz” emblazoned in large white letters and made their way to stops in the Pittsburgh area to shake hands with voters.
“This state has traditionally been of enormous importance, but southwestern Pennsylvania has been something like the swing state within the swing state,” says Kristin Kanthak, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.
Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is a diverse county with urban, suburban and rural areas and many people who have not yet decided how they will vote, she said.
“It makes sense to come here and ask for votes because there are votes to be won here,” Kanthak said of Harris. “It’s not just about mobilizing his voter base. It’s about having the opportunity to talk to truly undecided voters.”
In the 2020 election, Biden won Allegheny County with 60% of the vote, while Trump won neighboring Beaver County, which includes Rochester, with about 58% of the vote.
After Trump’s surprise victory in Pennsylvania in 2016, Biden was able to turn Pennsylvania on its head in 2020 – and thus win the White House. This was achieved, among other things, by increasing his vote totals in heavily Democratic Pittsburgh, the state’s second-largest city and the county seat of Allegheny County.
Biden eagerly courted the region’s labor unions, opening his 2020 presidential campaign in a Teamsters meeting hall in Pittsburgh with the declaration, “I am a union man.” As president, he opposed the takeover of the renowned Pittsburgh steel company US Steel by a Japanese company, saying the company “should remain fully American,” and imposed higher tariffs on Chinese steel.
Trump, who is counting on high turnout from his white, working-class electorate, is not giving up on the region. The districts around Pittsburgh switched from Democrats to Republicans in the last presidential election and served Trump well in his two previous attempts.
Trump has also embraced protectionist trade policies and insisted he is pro-worker. His promise to increase U.S. energy production and to say “drill, baby, drill” has resonated in working-class districts in southwestern Pennsylvania like Washington, where a boom in natural gas production has helped make Pennsylvania the country’s second-largest producer after Texas. Harris once wanted to ban fracking, a process used to extract oil and gas, before recently backing away from her previous position.
Dana Brown, Director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women at Chatham University and In an interview with Politics, Harris said she would use the bus trip to reach voters in the southwest part of the state “while she still has great momentum” and to boost local media coverage.
“She’s going to get a lot of that free media attention,” Brown said. “I think her hope is to keep that momentum going and focus on her and less on her opponent.”
Bus tours have become a staple of political campaigns, in part because they generate free media exposure. During such trips, candidates slip out of their suit pants and leave Washington to travel around the country, meeting voters face-to-face in small venues like restaurants and corner shops.
Biden traveled through Iowa in December 2019 on an eight-day bus tour that he called “No Malarkey.”
During his re-election campaign in 2012, President Barack Obama traveled through small towns in Ohio on his “Betting on America” bus tour.
“It’s always fun to just be outside of Washington, and it’s wonderful for me to connect with people,” Obama said during a stopover.
Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also traveled by bus when they campaigned for a second term.
The Democratic Party Convention begins on Monday.
___
Associated Press writers Michael Rubinkam in northeastern Pennsylvania, Michelle L. Price in New York and Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
