Harris-Walz ticket battles for Georgia voters with bus tour

On Thursday, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz are on their second day of a bus tour through Georgia. But that bus isn’t navigating the crowded interstates around Atlanta. It’s down in southeast Georgia, stopping in at BBQ joints and a high school band rehearsal.

It’s part of a strategy to appeal to rural voters in counties typically ceded to Republicans. This broad outreach is similar to how Barack Obama conducted his successful campaign in 2008, but more specifically, Harris’ Georgia plan partly follows the playbook of Sen. Raphael Warnock’s successful campaigns in 2021 and 2022.

President Joe Biden won Georgia by just 0.3 percentage points in 2020. And 538’s polling average of the state has Harris ahead of Donald Trump by a similar margin. So anything Harris and Walz can do to pad their edge with more voters in rural areas should help win the Peach State, no matter how much chaos is generated by the Trump-supporting state election board. 

And if they nail down Georgia, that makes it much harder for Donald Trump to find any way back into the White House.