Vice President Kamala Harris will set out this week on a swing-state campaign blitz, giving her a far heavier travel schedule than her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
It will be a critical week for Harris, who is rushing to introduce herself to voters with just three months until Election Day. It will also be the first time she will appear with her yet-to-be-announced running mate.
Starting Tuesday, Harris will campaign across seven swing states over five days, one of the heaviest weeks of campaign-related travel in the general election.
Her team has vetted six contenders to be her running mate: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Walz, Shapiro and Kelly each met separately with Harris on Sunday, according to a source familiar with the meetings.
Harris is set to appear alongside her running mate for the first time Tuesday in Philadelphia, where the pair will kick off the cross-country tour.
Her travel swing is a 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 traveled to campaign stops in eight states during the final 24 days of his candidacy. Harris’ travel this week will take her to seven states in less than a fourth of the time.
Harris will visit five states that she and Biden flipped blue in 2020: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona. She will also make stops in North Carolina, which Biden lost by a slim margin, and Nevada, where Democrats won narrowly.
The trip highlights the generational gap between Harris compared with Biden and Trump, Democratic allies said.
Biden’s candidacy was consistently plagued by voter concerns about his age, and his final weeks as the presumptive nominee were punctuated by a stream of congressional Democrats urging him to pass the torch to a new generation.
“Age really does matter” when it comes to a candidate’s ability to commit to long campaign trips, said Amanda Renteria, who was the 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 by the end of his term.
“It is amazing what candidates can do when they’re traveling around, and you don’t know what time it is, and you don’t know what day it is, but everyone’s in it,” she said. “And you can only sustain that for so long. And when you’re at the age of Trump, I don’t know how you keep up with that.”
Trump is scheduled this week to hold a rally 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 to be a swing state.
Reached for comment, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung pointed to the overall difference in the number of Trump and Harris campaign trips.
“In this cycle, President Trump has by far visited more battleground states, held more rallies, held more fundraisers, done more interviews and engaged with local reporters,” Cheung said of Trump, who launched his campaign more than a year and a half before Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“Kamala Harris can’t even give a simple media interview since she was anointed the Democrat nominee,” he continued. Harris has not held a sit-down media interview since Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, though she has answered journalists’ questions in media gaggles.
In the days after Biden’s widely panned June debate in Georgia, his campaign was in damage control mode. Biden spoke at a North Carolina rally and traveled to fundraisers in New York, New Jersey and Virginia before he held 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 spokesperson Abhi Rahman said that if Biden had stayed in the race, “I’m sure that there would have been blitzes like this, as well.”
But now “there’s definitely a lot of desire to make sure that the vice president is defining herself and her VP before Republicans get a chance to,” Rahman said. “So the timing of this definitely goes with that.”
When Biden was the presumptive nominee, the Trump campaign aimed many of its attacks at his cognitive ability, leaning into voters’ concerns about his age. But with Harris’ being a generation younger than Trump, Republicans have had to pivot their approach.
“I think she’s making a point of her relative youth and vitality,” said Bill Galston, a Brookings Institution fellow and official in President Bill Clinton’s administration. “It’s a point that she doesn’t have to talk about because she’s just showing it.”
Harris’ campaign swing is also consistent with how candidates typically pick up the pace as the election draws closer, said Aleigha Cavalier, a Democratic strategist at the strategy and marketing agency Precision Strategies. But she said Harris’ travel pace compared to Trump’s and Biden’s is “a real advantage.”
“I think the fact that she’s willing and able to do this many events in a small amount of time is something that can make a real difference, especially when we’re less than a hundred days out” from the election, Cavalier said.
Traveling for campaign events can create more opportunities for local media coverage, accelerate fundraising and identify potential future volunteers, said Eric Jaye, a Democratic consultant at Storefront Political Media, a campaign consulting firm. But most important, candidates are activating thousands of “micro-influencers” at rallies, he said.
“They’re all holding up their phones, and they’re all publishers,” he said, adding that when rallygoers post pictures of themselves with a candidate, “that will go out to their networks, which is an endorsement for their networks.”
“If you can get 10,000 people to share that they trust Kamala Harris, that has an impact as a form of media and communication in and of itself,” Jaye said. “So essentially these are conventions of micro-influencers.”
Already, the Harris campaign has touted a groundswell of volunteer support, noting in a memo released Saturday that over the previous 12 days, volunteers had placed 2.3 million phone calls and knocked on 172,000 doors.
The seven-state tour “shows that she has a ton of energy,” Renteria said. “It shows that her campaign is ready to go and is thinking through things and able to execute well. So it’s super exciting.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
