This story was updated on Monday, Aug. 26 at 10:46 a.m.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will launch a bus tour across South Georgia on Wednesday, concluding with a Thursday night Harris rally around Savannah.
The campaign swing comes days after Harris formally accepted her party’s nomination for president in Chicago and as the ticket looks to translate the energy of a whirlwind few weeks into a sustainable force that can propel the campaign through November.
Georgia remains a critical battleground, with most polls showing a tight race between Harris and former President Donald Trump. A regular visitor to Georgia since assuming the vice presidency, Harris last campaigned in Atlanta in early August, not long after ascending to the top of the ticket. Since then, Democrats see signs the ticket swap has made Georgia and other Sun Belt states more competitive.
A previously scheduled rally in Savannah was postponed due to Hurricane Debby.
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While Democratic candidates typically focus energy and resources around metro Atlanta, home to the bulk of the state’s Democratic electorate, strategists and organizers say outreach outside of populous Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb and Gwinnett Counties has played a key role in recent wins. The state has significant populations of Black voters in smaller metros like Savannah, Columbus, Macon and Albany.
Quentin Fulks, the Harris deputy campaign manager who ran U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock’s successful 2022 campaign, told WABE last week that reaching more corners of the state is a top lesson he is applying to this national campaign in 2024.
“I think Democrats have to go places where they don’t normally go,” Fulks says. “I’m not saying we’re going to turn counties we were losing 90-10 to places we are somehow now winning. But we have to cut down on those margins.”
That’s especially important in a state that President Joe Biden won by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, even if overall, large swaths of South Georgia have been a bulwark of support for Trump and Republican candidates. U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican nominee for vice president, campaigned Thursday at a donut shop and sheriff’s office in Valdosta.
Democrats also hope Walz, a former high school football coach raised in a small town, will resonate especially in the smaller towns and rural counties that characterize much of South Georgia — places that have traditionally been Republican strongholds. During a bus tour before the DNC across western Pennsylvania, among other stops, Harris and Walz visited a high school football practice.
“I know everybody looks at Atlanta as the African American mecca,” Albany Commissioner Demetrius Young told WABE in 2022. “But if you follow this blue wave in Georgia, it came right through Albany down into Southwest Georgia. We need to hold the ground that we’ve gained.”
Nearly a quarter of rural Americans were people of color in 2020, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. While the country’s rural population is shrinking overall, its diversity is growing.
“When people think of rural voters, they think of farmers, white people,” Albany State University alum Maggie Bell told WABE in 2022. “But really, there are Black people down here — Black people who want to be part of the election process, but they don’t get a knock at their door.”
