Harris takes fight to Trump in swing state of Georgia

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are campaigning across Georgia in a bid to hold it after Joe Biden won the key southern state by just 12,000 votes in 2020.

Vice-President Kamala Harris and her running mate Governor Tim Walz during a campaign stop at Liberty County High School in Hinesville, Georgia. Picture: AFP

US Vice-President Kamala Harris campaigned across southern Georgia by bus on Wednesday as Democrats try to harness a surge of enthusiasm and put the swing state back in play in November’s election against Donald Trump.

Joe Biden had been on course to lose the southern state he flipped from Mr Trump in 2020, but since Ms Harris replaced the President as the candidate five weeks ago, the party has begun to hope it could win it again.

Both Ms Harris and Mr Trump are ramping up their campaigns in seven key battleground states as the now super-short White House race enters its final 10-week sprint.

“We’re seizing on the energy and putting in the work to win again in 2024,” the Harris campaign said.

Riding a wave of enthusiasm from the Democratic National Convention last week, Ms Harris and running mate Tim Walz are travelling through southern parts of Georgia on a two-day bus tour. The blitz is focused on black and working-class voters who the campaign believes are crucial to a Harris victory in the state in November.

She and Mr Walz began their tour in Savannah, where they met students from a historically black university, before heading by bus through rural communities where some onlookers waved Trump flags, and then stopping at Liberty County High School in Hinesville.

“We wanted to come by just to let you know that our country is counting on you,” Ms Harris told student marching band members there.

Back in Savannah the candidates ducked into Sandfly Bar-B-Q, a small restaurant where they chatted with diners and staff and posed for photographs.

“You have to stay in it,” Ms Harris encouraged a patron about the upcoming election.

The bus tour culminates with a rally on Thursday in Savannah, where the 59-year-old also faces a critical test on the same day: her first sit-down interview since starting her campaign, in a joint appearance on CNN with Mr Walz.

Republicans have criticised her for not facing media scrutiny sooner, and Trump spokesman Jason Miller accused her on Wednesday of using Mr Walz as a “human shield”.

She has reinvigorated the Democratic Party, raised more than half a billion dollars and wiped out Mr Trump’s lead in the polls. Ms Harris insists, however, she remains the underdog, and that the election will be won or lost in the battleground states.

In the last days of Mr Biden’s campaign, increasingly poor polls showed his only real remaining hope of victory was through winning the three “Rust Belt” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Ms Harris is now also targeting the four “Sun Belt” states of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina as a way to give her multiple ways to win the overall Electoral College vote.

The Peach State is a particularly tough target. Mr Biden won Georgia by a razor-thin margin of less than 12,000 votes in 2020, in a result Mr Trump bitterly contested. The Republican now faces criminal charges in Georgia related to his alleged plot to overturn that vote.

On Wednesday in an uplift for her campaign, the latest Fox News poll shows Ms Harris edging Mr Trump in Georgia, 50 per cent to 48 per cent. But Mr Trump is also stepping up his swing state campaign as he seeks to recover his poise after being wrong-footed by Ms Harris.

The Vice-President is not only two decades younger and of black and South Asian heritage, but vying to be the first female US president.

Mr Trump will be Michigan and Wisconsin, before travelling to Pennsylvania.

AFP