The bus tour marks Harris’ eighth trip to Pennsylvania this year, and her second this month. The vice president chose to make her first joint appearance with Walz on the ticket in Philadelphia on Aug. 6.
On Sunday, they arrived with their spouses earlier at Pittsburgh International Airport and greeted supporters. The foursome held hands and raised their arms together before cheering supporters who held campaign signs.
They then boarded a bright blue bus that says “Harris Walz” in big white letters as they set off to make stops in the Pittsburgh area to glad-hand with voters.
In Rochester, Harris, Walz and their spouses spent a few minutes sitting at tables with volunteers and making phone calls to line up support.
“79 days to go, Hannah,” Harris said while on the phone.
At another point while making calls, she said, “We’re all in this together.”
Walz hung up his phone and said of the caller, “He’s all in,” and gave a thumbs up. He made another call and asked the person on the line, “How are you feeling? What are you hearing from folks?”
Kristin Kanthak, associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, said Pennsylvania “is a state that traditionally has been super important, but southwestern Pennsylvania has been really kind of the battleground part of the battleground state.”
Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is a diverse county with urban, suburban and rural areas, and a lot of people there haven’t decided how they will vote, she said.
“It makes sense to come here and ask for votes because there are votes up for grabs here,” Kanthak said of Harris. “It’s not just about turning out your base. It’s about having an opportunity to speak to truly undecided voters.”
In the 2020 race, 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 surprise win in the state in 2016, Biden flipped Pennsylvania in 2020 — and, in so doing, won the White House — in part by running up his vote totals in heavily Democratic Pittsburgh, the state’s second-largest city and the county seat of Allegheny County.
Biden assiduously courted the area’s blue-collar labor unions, kicking off his 2020 presidential campaign at a Teamsters hall in Pittsburgh by declaring, “I am a union man.” As president, he opposed the acquisition of Pittsburgh’s storied U.S. Steel by a Japanese company, saying it “should remain totally American,” and enacted steeper tariffs on Chinese steel.
Trump, who is counting on strong turnout from his base of white, working-class voters, is not conceding the area. The counties around Pittsburgh have shifted from Democrat to Republican in recent presidential contests, delivering for Trump in both of his earlier runs.
Trump has also embraced protectionist trade policies and insists he is pro-worker. His vow to increase U.S. energy production and “drill, baby, drill” has resonated in southwestern Pennsylvania blue-collar counties like Washington, where a natural gas drilling boom has helped make Pennsylvania the nation’s No. 2 producer after Texas. Harris once wanted to ban fracking, an oil and gas extraction process, before recently disavowing her earlier position.
Dana Brown, director of Chatham University’s Pennsylvania Center for Women & Politics, said in an interview that Harris will use the bus trip to spin up local media coverage as well as reach out to voters in the state’s southwestern region “while she still has a great deal of momentum at her back.”
“She is going to garner a lot of that free media attention,” Brown said. “I believe their hope … is to keep that momentum up and focused on her and less so on her opponent.”
Bus tours have become a staple of political campaigns partly because of the free media coverage they generate. Such trips get the candidates out of their power suits and out of Washington so they can travel the country and score face time with voters in small venues like diners and mom-and-pop shops.
Biden rolled across Iowa on an eight-day bus tour he dubbed “No Malarkey” in December 2019.
During his 2012 reelection campaign, President Barack Obama traveled though small-town Ohio on his “Betting on America” bus tour.
“It’s always fun just being out of Washington, and for me to be able to interact with folks is wonderful,” Obama said at one stop.
Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also traveled by bus when they campaigned for a second term.
The Democratic National Convention opens Monday.
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Price reported from New York. Associated Press writers Michael Rubinkam in northeastern Pennsylvania and Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.