WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz will be on a bus campaign tour in southwestern Pennsylvania on Sunday, hoping to ride the wave of enthusiasm her presidential bid has generated to the party’s nominating convention in Chicago this week.
Vice President Harris and Minnesota Gov. Walz, along with their spouses Doug Emhoff and Wen Walz, are expected to ride a bus through the Pittsburgh area and shake hands with voters.
Harris and Emoff were scheduled to speak at an event in Rochester, a district in Beaver County that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump won in 2020 but lost to Democrat Joe Biden in the general election.
Southwestern Pennsylvania is a key part of a key battleground state that has long been on the radar of presidential candidates. The state voted for the Republican candidate in 2016 and for the Democratic candidate in 2020. Harris and Trump are both competing to see who will put Pennsylvania in their column on November 5.
Most polls, including the New York Times/Siena College poll and Fox News, show Harris and Trump in a tight race statewide.
President Trump held a rally in Wilkes-Barre, in the northeastern part of the state, on Saturday, following rallies in Harrisburg and Butler in July, where he survived an assassination attempt.
The bus tour is Harris’s eighth trip to Pennsylvania this year and her second this month. The vice president announced on Aug. 6 that Walz would be her running mate, hours before they made their first joint appearance on the ticket that day in Philadelphia.
“It’s traditionally a very important state, but southwestern Pennsylvania was really a battleground state among battleground states,” said Kristin Kantak, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.
Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is a diverse county with a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas, and many people have yet to decide how they will vote, she said.
“It makes sense for Harris to come here and ask for votes, because there is an opportunity here to get the vote,” Kantak said of Harris. “It’s not just about showing the base. It’s about having an opportunity to speak to voters who haven’t really made up their minds.”
In the 2020 election, Biden won Allegheny County with 60% of the vote, while Trump won neighboring Beaver County, which includes Rochester, with about 58% of the vote.
After Trump’s unexpected victory in the state in 2016, Biden flipped Pennsylvania in 2020 and entered the White House, in part because he increased his vote share in the Democratic stronghold of Pittsburgh, the state’s second-largest city and the county seat of Allegheny County.
Biden began his 2020 campaign by declaring at a Teamsters hall in Pittsburgh, “I’m a union man,” and he has courted the area’s blue-collar unions diligently. As president, he opposed the Japanese company’s takeover of Pittsburgh’s famed U.S. Steel, saying it “must be made entirely in America,” and he has imposed higher tariffs on Chinese steel.
Biden dropped out of the reelection race last month and endorsed Harris as his successor.
Trump, who is counting on a strong turnout of white working-class voters, has not conceded the area. The county around Pittsburgh recently flipped from Democratic to Republican in the presidential election, and Trump won both of his previous elections.
Trump has also embraced protectionist trade policies and claims to be a pro-worker. His pledge to increase U.S. energy production and “drill, baby, drill” resonated with blue-collar counties in southwestern Pennsylvania, like Washington. A natural gas boom has made Pennsylvania the nation’s second-largest producer, behind Texas. Harris recently sought to ban fracking, a process for extracting oil and gas, before repudiating her previous stance.
Dana Brown, director of the Pennsylvania Center on Women and Politics at Chatham University, said in an interview that Harris would use the bus tour to reach voters in the southwestern part of the state and generate local media coverage while “there’s still a ton of momentum left.”
“She’s going to get a lot of free media attention,” Brown said. “I think their hope is to keep that momentum going and focus on her and less on her opponent.”
Bus tours have become a staple of political campaigns, in part because of the free media coverage they provide. These trips allow candidates to leave their positions of power behind, travel around the country outside of Washington, and talk face-to-face with voters in small venues like restaurants and stores.
Biden took an eight-day bus tour of Iowa in December 2019 called “No Malarkey.”
During his 2012 re-election campaign, President Barack Obama traveled to small towns in Ohio on his “Bet on America” bus tour.
“It’s always fun to be away from Washington, and it’s great to be able to interact with people,” President Obama said during one visit.
Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also used buses to campaign for a second term.
The Democratic National Convention is on Monday.
Associated Press writers Michael Rubinkam in northeastern Pennsylvania and Lynley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
