Harris and Walz reach out to voters in GOP strongholds in southeast Georgia bus tour

HINESVILLE, Ga. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, dropped in on a high school band practice Wednesday as part of a two-day bus tour through southeast Georgia, a critical battleground state that Democrats just narrowly won four years ago.

Harris and Walz paid a visit to Liberty County High School in Hinesville, listening to the marching band perform its school fight song and delivering brief remarks to students and faculty on the first day of their Georgia swing, which will culminate in a rally in Savannah on Thursday night.

“We’re so proud of you and we’re counting on you," Harris told the students, some shrieking with excitement at the sight of the vice president. "Your generation … is what is going to propel our country into the next era of what we can do and what we can be.”

Harris told the students that she, too, played in the band — an aide said the vice president had played the French horn, xylophone and kettle drums.

The visit is part of a two-pronged strategy by the Harris-Walz campaign to make inroads in GOP strongholds and to use smaller, more intimate settings to showcase a softer side of the ticket — which is still relatively unknown by the electorate. Campaign officials believe that in order to beat Republican Donald Trump in the state, they will need more than Atlanta and the suburbs that delivered for Joe Biden in 2020.

Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said bus tours offer an "opportunity to get to places we don’t usually go (and) make sure we’re competing in all communities.”

The campaign wants the events to motivate voters in GOP-leaning areas who don’t traditionally see the candidates, and hopes that the engagements drive viral moments that cut through crowded media coverage to reach voters across the country.

Harris and Walz also stopped at Sandfly, a barbecue restaurant outside Savannah, where some of the patrons were teachers. One thanked Walz, a former high school teacher himself.

Tyler said the campaign’s strategy of using informal engagements to reach voters has been consistent from when President Biden was on the ticket, but the nature of the events has shifted along with the candidates. During a bus tour in western Pennsylvania, for example, they stopped at a football practice — Walz is a former assistant high school football coach.

Walz met Harris on the tarmac in Savannah, and the two greeted students from Savannah State University before setting off in their bright blue bus with “Harris Walz” emblazoned in big letters on the side, along with the phrase “A New Way Forward.”

It looks like a regular campaign bus, but this one is an armored U.S. Secret Service vehicle driven by agents that comes with lights and sirens and secure communications. After the first stop, Harris shifted back to her traditional SUV, the bus relegated to the back of the motorcade.

Harris and Walz are also sitting down with CNN anchor Dana Bash for their first joint interview. The interview will air Thursday night.

The Democratic strategy to peel off votes in Republican parts of the state has had some success before. Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first Black senator, won reelection in 2022 by nearly 3 percentage points — while Biden carried Georgia by only a quarter percentage point about two years earlier — in part by venturing into the deepest red areas. The operatives involved in Warnock's win are now on Harris’ campaign team.

The Georgia trip is a makeup visit from earlier in the month, when the duo was set to embark on a seven-state swing tour introducing the new Democratic ticket. The North Carolina and Georgia legs of the trip got scrapped as Tropical Storm Debby battered the region.

The easygoing stops were a contrast to a bakery visit last week by Trump's running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance in Valdosta, Georgia, where he struggled to banter with employees while buying doughnuts and one worker asked to be kept off camera.

During an NBC interview Tuesday, Vance said that he felt terrible for the worker.

“We walked in, and there’s 20 Secret Service agents, and there’s 15 cameras, and she clearly had not been properly warned, and she was terrified, right? I just felt awful for her.”

Vance also said Wednesday that he was among those who spoke with Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp after Trump's blistering attacks against him at a rally in the state just a few weeks ago. Trump blamed the governor for his narrow 2020 loss in the state, railed against Kemp for not giving in to his false theories of election fraud and attributed his legal problems in the state to Kemp's not stepping in to stop a local district attorney from prosecuting him.

"I encouraged him to support the president, and he didn’t take much persuasion. He wanted to support the president because he thinks Kamala Harris is going to be a disaster,” Vance said.

Trump changed his tune last week, thanking the governor in a social media post for all his “help and support in Georgia, where a win is so important to the success of our Party and, most importantly, our Country.”

On the eve of Harris’ visit, Kemp told Fox News that Republicans "need to be telling people why they should vote for us, what we’re going to do to make things better than they are right now. And there’s a host of issues that I think you could contrast Kamala Harris and her record."

“To me, that’s what we need to stay focused on, not some dustup from two or three weeks ago," he said.

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign launched a new ad across the battleground states, seeking to tie Trump to the conservative “Project 2025."

The first ad asserts that Trump is “out for control” over voters, juxtaposing Trump quotes with ominous screenshots of the plan. It’s part of Harris’ $370 million in digital and television ad reservations between Labor Day and Election Day.

Led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a detailed 920-page handbook for governing under the next Republican administration, including ousting thousands of civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists and reversing the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medications used in abortions.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, though it was drafted by longtime allies and former officials of the Trump administration. Last month, he posted on social media that he had not seen the plan, had “no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

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Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.