Vice President Kamala Harris will begin a campaign blitz in swing states this week, giving her a much heavier travel schedule than that of her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
It will be a critical week for Harris, who is racing to introduce herself to voters with just three months until Election Day. It will also be the first time she appears with her yet-to-be-announced running mate.
Starting Tuesday, Harris will campaign in seven swing states over five days, one of the heaviest weeks of campaign-related travel in the general election.
His team vetted six candidates to be his running mate: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro , and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Walz, Shapiro and Kelly met separately with Harris on Sunday, according to a source familiar with the meetings.
Harris is set to appear alongside his running mate for the first time on Tuesday in Philadelphia, where the pair will begin their cross-country tour.
His travel trajectory stands in stark contrast to the pace of Trump and President Joe Biden. Trump has delivered remarks in 10 states since the June 27 debate, while Biden has traveled to campaign stops in eight states during the final 24 days of his candidacy. Harris’ trip this week will take her to seven states in less than a quarter of the time.
Harris will visit five states where she and Biden turned blue in 2020: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona. She will also make stops in North Carolina, where Biden lost by a narrow margin, and Nevada, where Democrats narrowly won.
The trip highlights the generational difference between Harris compared to Biden and Trump, Democratic allies said.
Biden’s candidacy was constantly dogged by voters’ concerns about his age, and his final weeks as the presumptive nominee were punctuated by a torrent of Democrats in Congress urging him to pass the torch to a new generation.
“Age really matters” when it comes to a candidate’s ability to commit to extensive campaign travel, said Amanda Renteria, who was national political director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Harris, 59, is a generation younger than Trump, 78, and Biden, 81.
In 2020, Biden was the oldest presidential winner in history. If elected, Trump would be the oldest sitting president at 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 everyone is involved,” she said. “And you can only sustain that for so long. And when you’re Trump’s age, I don’t know how you can keep up with that.”
Trump is scheduled this week to hold a rally on Friday and deliver remarks at a dinner in Montana, a state he won in 2020 with 56.9% of the vote. He is also scheduled to hold a fundraiser Saturday in Colorado, which Biden won by a similar margin in 2020. Neither state is considered a swing state.
Reached for comment, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung pointed to the overall difference in the number of campaign trips by Trump and Harris.
“This cycle, President Trump has visited by far the most swing states, held the most rallies, held the most fundraisers, given the most interviews and interacted with local reporters,” Cheung said of Trump, who launched his campaign more than a year and a half ago. before. Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“Kamala Harris can’t even give a simple media interview since she was elected as the Democratic nominee,” he continued. Harris has not given a media interview since Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, although she has answered questions from journalists in media groups.
In the days following Biden’s widely criticized June debate in Georgia, his campaign was in damage control mode. Biden spoke at a rally in North Carolina and traveled 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 remained in the race, “I’m sure there would have been blitzes like this as well.”
But now “there is definitely a lot of desire to make sure the vice president defines herself and her vice president before Republicans have a chance to do so,” Rahman said. “So the timing of this definitely fits with that.”
When Biden was the presumptive nominee, the Trump campaign directed many of its attacks on his cognitive ability, drawing on voters’ concerns about his age. But because Harris is a generation younger than Trump, Republicans have had to change their approach to him.
“I think she’s emphasizing her 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 she doesn’t need to talk about because she’s just showing.”
The swing in Harris’ campaign is also consistent with how candidates typically pick up the pace as elections approach, said Aleigha Cavalier, Democratic strategist at strategy and marketing agency Precision Strategies. But she said Harris’s travel pace compared to Trump and Biden is “a real advantage.”
“I think the fact that she is willing and able to hold so many events in a short space of time is something that could make a real difference, especially with less than a hundred days left” before the election, Cavalier said.
Traveling to campaign events can create more opportunities for local media coverage, speed up fundraising and identify potential future volunteers, said Eric Jaye, a Democratic consultant at Storefront Political Media, a campaign consulting firm. But most importantly, candidates are activating thousands of “micro-influencers” at rallies, he said.
“Everyone is holding their phones and they are all editors,” he said, adding that when rally attendees post photos of themselves with a candidate, “it will be sent to their networks, which is an endorsement to their networks. “
“If you can get 10,000 people to share that they trust Kamala Harris, that will have an impact as a form of media and communication in and of itself,” Jaye said. “So essentially these are micro-influencer conventions.”
Harris’ campaign has already promoted a wave of volunteer support, noting in a memo released Saturday that in the previous 12 days, volunteers made 2.3 million phone calls and knocked on 172,000 doors.
The seven-state tour “shows she has a lot of energy,” Renteria said. “It shows that her campaign is ready to go, thinking it through and being able to execute well. So it’s super exciting.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
