(AFP) – Kamala Harris returns to the campaign trail Wednesday with a blitz in the battleground state of Georgia, hoping to turn her momentum from the Democratic convention into a solid lead against Donald Trump. The US vice president is embarking on a bus tour of the crucial southern state with running mate Tim Walz, in her first campaign appearance since accepting the party’s nomination with an electrifying speech in Chicago.
The pair will then on Thursday sit for an interview with CNN, which will be Harris’s first since starting her campaign, an issue Republicans have used to accuse her of running scared. Harris will also hold a solo rally in the city of Savannah, Georgia, to “lay out the stark choice facing voters” in what remains a knife-edge election that will be decided by just a handful of swing states. Republican Trump will be campaigning on Thursday in Michigan, another crucial battleground, where he is set to deliver remarks on the economy.
The 59-year-old Harris is still riding a wave of support from the Democratic National Convention, where a reinvigorated party celebrated her anointment a mere month after President Joe Biden bowed out of the race. Harris insists that she remains the underdog as she and former president Trump enter the 10-week sprint for the White House. Despite being slightly ahead in the polls after wiping out Trump’s lead in the space of a single heady month, her lead is well within the margin of error, even if she will be hoping for a typical post-convention bounce.
Her campaign is now firmly focused on seven battlegrounds where it believes the race will be won or lost — and Georgia is once again one of the most hotly contested states. Biden won Georgia for the Democrats in 2020 for the first time in nearly three decades, by a razor-thin margin of less than 12,000 votes. Trump now faces charges in Georgia related to alleged efforts to overturn the result.
– ‘Optimistic’ – On their bus tour in the southern part of Georgia, Harris and Walz will be targeting a “diverse coalition” that includes many Black voters and working-class families, her campaign said. Harris will then use her Savannah rally to contrast Trump’s “dark and dangerous” agenda with her own “optimistic and patriotic vision for a new way forward.”
While in Georgia, Harris and Walz will sit down for an interview with CNN on Thursday, the channel announced. It will air at primetime at 9:00 pm the same day (0100 GMT Friday). Harris’s camp has so far let the buzz around her nomination speak for itself, with the candidate keeping her policies vague and her media interactions to a minimum.
Following the convention, the US election campaign has gone into top gear. Trump will be attacking Harris’s “dangerously liberal policies” during a visit to a steel plant in Potterville, Michigan, on Thursday. On the US holiday of Labor Day on Monday, Biden and Harris will make their first joint appearance since the convention in Pittsburgh, in crucial Pennsylvania. They will be “underscoring the importance of American workers and unions,” the campaign said, as they battle for blue-collar votes.
Then looming on the horizon is a major milestone — the first Trump-Harris debate on September 10. Neither candidate will forget that it was 81-year-old Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump in a debate on June 27 — in Atlanta, Georgia — that ended up forcing him out of the White House race. The clash is set to take place in Philadelphia on the ABC network, despite disagreements over the format and repeated threats by the 78-year-old Trump to pull out. Harris’s campaign alleged that Trump’s camp was vying to keep the microphones off during the debate to protect him from any off-color comments or if he loses his temper.
– Danny KEMP
© 2024 AFP
