Vice President Kamala Harris will hit the swing state campaign this week, giving her a heavier travel schedule than her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
It will be a critical week for Harris rushes to introduce himself Voters are only three months away from polling day. It will also be her first time with a yet-to-be-announced running mate.
Beginning Tuesday, Harris will campaign in seven swing states over five days, one of the heaviest weeks of campaign travel in the general election.
His team vetted six candidates to run for him: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz.
Walz, Shapiro and Kelly each met separately with Harris on Sunday, according to a source familiar with the meetings.
Harris is set to make his first public appearance with his running mate Tuesday in Philadelphiawhere the couple will embark on a cross-country tour.
His travel swing contrasts sharply with the pace of Trump and President Joe Biden. Trump has spoken in 10 states since the June 27 debate, while Biden has made campaign stops in eight states during the last 24 days of his candidacy. Harris’ trip this week will take him to seven states in less than a quarter of the time.
Harris will visit five states with Biden turned blue In 2020: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona. He will also stop in North Carolina, where Biden lost by a narrow margin, and Nevada, where the Democrats won by a narrow margin.
Democratic allies said the visit underscored the generation gap between Harris and Biden compared to Trump.
Biden’s candidacy has consistently faced voter concerns about his age, and his final weeks as a presumptive nominee have been punctuated by an influx of congressional Democrats urging him to pass the torch to a new generation.
Amanda Renteria, the national political director of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, said that “age really matters” when it comes to a candidate’s ability to make long campaign trips.
Harris, 59, is a generation younger than Trump, 78, and Biden, 81.
In 2020, it was Biden the oldest presidential winner in history. If elected, Trump will be the oldest president until the end of his term.
“It’s amazing what candidates can do when they’re traveling and you don’t know what time it is and you don’t know what day it is, but everybody’s there,” she said. “And you can only keep it up for so long. I don’t know how you keep going when you’re Trump’s age.”
Trump is scheduled to hold a rally and speak at a dinner in Montana this week on Friday. He won in 2020 with 56.9% of the vote. He also plans to hold a fundraiser Saturday in Colorado, which Biden won by a similar margin in 2020. No state is considered a swing state.
Reached for comment, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung pointed to the overall difference in the number of Trump and Harris campaign visits.
“This cycle, President Trump has visited more battleground states, held more rallies, raised more money, given more interviews and engaged with local reporters,” Cheung said of Trump. started his campaign More than a year and a half before Harris became the Democratic nominee.
“Kamala Harris can’t even do a simple interview with the media because she’s been nominated as the Democratic nominee,” he said. Harris has not held a sit-down media interview since Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, though he has answered questions from reporters in the media.
In the days following the highly publicized June debate in Georgia, Biden’s campaign was in damage control mode. Biden spoke at a North Carolina rally and went to fundraisers in New York, New Jersey and Virginia before holding a rally in Wisconsin.
His next campaign trips were to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada, the last of which was cut short when he contracted Covid. Days later, he dropped out of the race.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Abhi Rahman said that if Biden had stayed in the race, “I’m sure there would have been blitzes like this.”
But now “there’s definitely a lot of desire to make sure the vice president nominates himself and his vice president before the Republicans get a chance,” he said. “So the timing of this is definitely right.”
When Biden became the presumptive nominee, the Trump campaign focused many of its attacks on his cognitive ability, based on concerns about voters’ age. But because Harris is a generation younger than Trump, Republicans had to change their approach.
“I think it points to his relative youth and vitality,” said Bill Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an official in President Bill Clinton’s administration. “It’s a point where he doesn’t need to talk because he just shows.”
Aleigha Cavalier, a Democratic strategist at Precision Strategies, a strategy and marketing agency, said Harris’ campaign swing is also in line with how candidates typically pace themselves as elections near. But he said Harris’ speed of travel was a “real advantage” compared to Trump and Biden.
“I think the fact that he’s willing and able to do so much in such a short period of time is something that could make a real difference, especially when we’re less than a hundred days away from the election,” Cavalier said.
Traveling for campaign events can create more opportunities for local media coverage, accelerate fundraising and identify potential future volunteers, said Eric Jaye, a Democratic consultant at campaign consulting firm Storefront Political Media. But most importantly, candidates activate thousands of “micro-influencers” at rallies, he said.
“They’re all holding up their phones and they’re all posting,” he said, adding that when rally-goers post pictures of themselves with a candidate, “it’s going to go to their networks, which is an endorsement for their networks.”
“If you can get 10,000 people to share that they trust Kamala Harris, that in itself has an impact as a form of media and communication,” Jaye said. “So these are essentially micro-influencer conventions.”
Already, the Harris campaign said in a memo released Saturday that volunteers had made 2.3 million phone calls and knocked on 172,000 doors in the previous 12 days.
The seven-state tour “shows he has a ton of energy,” Renteria said. “It shows that his campaign is ready to go and that he has thought things through and is able to execute well. So it’s very exciting.”