Harris and Walz Point Their Campaign Bus to Rural Georgia

ATLANTA — Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, seeking to build Democrats’ momentum in the Sun Belt, will campaign on Wednesday in the rural counties of southeast Georgia before holding a rally Thursday in Savannah.

Democrats outside the party’s Metro Atlanta engine have long complained that focusing on the capital city, where a majority of Democratic voters in the state live, ignores pockets of supporters in less populous areas. Organizers have emphasized the particular need to engage voters in rural south Georgia and the state’s mountainous northern regions — both heavily conservative parts of the state that will still require high turnout from Black and moderate white voters to keep Democrats competitive.

A visit from the presidential ticket, some rural Democrats say, shows that top party leaders heeded their calls.

“A little does a lot in rural areas,” said Melissa Clink, the former chair of the Democratic Party in Forsyth County, north of the Atlanta suburbs. “If we can get some face time with, especially, the top of the ticket, then not only does that help donors open up their wallets to fund get-out-the-vote operations on the ground but it also inspires more people to do more work because they feel seen.”

The Georgia bus tour is similar to a campaign trip that Harris and Walz took to a conservative-leaning county outside Pittsburgh this month. Like south Georgia, Democrats in western Pennsylvania have also said their voters were being unwisely ignored by presidential campaigns. On their tour, Harris and Walz made sure to highlight the diversity of the area, engaging with residents in Aliquippa, a former steel town that has a large Black population, where they spent time with a high school football team alongside former Pittsburgh Steelers star Jerome Bettis. (Walz is a former high school football coach, which might also play well in Georgia.)

More broadly, Democrats hope Walz — who flipped a largely rural and more conservative House district in southern Minnesota in 2006 — can help stem their losses with rural and white working-class voters, especially men, who have grown increasingly hostile to their party. He has worked to present a more caring version of masculinity that contrasts with the brash aggressiveness of Trump.

His party knows it cannot hope to win those rural voters outright. But in what is expected to be a tight election, Democrats are aiming to keep their margins manageable outside the cities and suburbs, something Joe Biden accomplished during his 2020 campaign. Harris has made few gains with white men since taking over the ticket.

The Harris campaign says it has invested heavily in rural Georgia, hiring nearly 50 staff members across seven offices, in places including the small cities of Valdosta and Albany close to the Florida line and rural towns like Millen and Cordele, which calls itself the watermelon capital of the world.

Polling shows that Harris has made Georgia competitive, after it seemed to be slipping out of reach for Biden. And Trump has devoted a significant chunk of his advertising budget to the state, suggesting his team also sees the state as being back in play.

In Savannah, where Harris will hold a rally Thursday, Democrats are hoping her visit will reignite energy in a city that is home to the second-largest cluster of blue votes in the state.

“Love is an action word — you show people first by your presence,” said Van Johnson, the mayor of Savannah, who has lobbied the Biden and Harris campaigns to visit the city for months since Harris visited in February. “Her presence is going to really be indicative of that esteem she has for our community.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .