SAVANNAH, Georgia – Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, kicked off a two-day bus tour of Georgia on Wednesday, traveling through rural areas in the state’s south and culminating with a major rally in the coastal city of Savannah.

Democrats will meet with supporters, campaign staff, small business owners and voters. Campaign staff are convinced that to win the crucial swing state in November against Republican Donald Trump, they need more than Atlanta and the suburbs that pledged to Joe Biden in 2020, and that they must also make progress, however small, in Republican strongholds.

The trip to Georgia is a make-up visit for earlier this month, when the duo was scheduled to unveil the new Democratic slate on a seven-state swing tour. The North Carolina and Georgia portions of the trip were canceled when Tropical Storm Debby devastated the region.

Walz met Harris on the tarmac in Savannah and greeted the Savannah State University students before the duo drove off in their bright blue bus with red and white accents. “Harris Walz” was emblazoned in large letters on the side, along with the phrase “A new way forward.” The special bus is armored – and belongs to the US Secret Service.

In addition to the bus tour and rally on Thursday, Harris and Walz will sit down with CNN anchor Dana Bash for their first joint interview. The interview will air Thursday evening.

The Democrats’ strategy of poaching votes in Republican parts of the state has been somewhat successful before. Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first black senator, won re-election in 2022 by nearly 3 percentage points — while Joe Biden won Georgia by just a quarter of a percentage point about two years earlier — in part by venturing into the most Republican areas, pushed in part by activists who are now on Harris’ campaign team.

Harris is conducting another blitz campaigning with President Biden in Detroit and Pittsburgh on Labor Day, even though the election is just over 70 days away. The first mail-in ballots will be sent to voters in just two weeks.

In Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp appears to have moved on from Trump’s fierce attacks against him at a rally in the state a few weeks ago, saying it was a “minor distraction that is a thing of the past.”

On the eve of Harris’ visit, Kemp told Fox News: “I’m not sure exactly what happened before the rally. I’ve heard a lot of different stories and explanations from people about what happened.”

At the rally, Trump attacked the governor, blaming him for his narrow 2020 loss in the state. In a roughly 10-minute tirade, Trump railed against Kemp for not pandering to his false theories about election fraud. He also blamed the governor for failing to stop a local district attorney from prosecuting him and others for their efforts to overturn the results in the state.

Last week, Trump changed his mind, 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.”

Kemp said on Fox that Republicans need to tell people why they should vote for us and what we’re going to do to make things better than they are now. And there are a number of issues where I think you could compare Kamala Harris and her record.”

“In my opinion, we need to focus on that and not on some argument from two or three weeks ago.”

Meanwhile, Harris’ campaign team has launched a new commercial in the swing states that aims to link Trump to the conservative “Project 2025.”

The first ad claims Trump wants to “control voters,” juxtaposing Trump quotes with ominous screenshots of the plan. The ad is part of Harris’ $370 million digital and TV ad booking between Labor Day and Election Day.

Led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a detailed, 920-page manual for governing under the next Republican administration that calls for, among other things, firing thousands of civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists and revoking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of abortion drugs.

Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, even though it was designed by longtime allies and former Trump administration officials. Last month, he posted on social media that he had not seen the plan, had “no idea who is responsible for it, and, unlike our very well-received Republican platform, had nothing to do with it.”

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications.