Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning in several states this week, giving her a much heavier travel schedule than her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
It will be a crucial week for Harris, who is rushing to introduce herself to voters with just three months to go until Election Day. It will also be the first time she has appeared with her as-yet-unannounced running mate.
Beginning Tuesday, Harris will spend five days campaigning in seven swing states, one of the busiest weeks of campaign travel in the general election.
Her team has selected six candidates for her running mate: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
According to a source familiar with the meetings, Walz, Shapiro and Kelly each met separately with Harris on Sunday.
Harris will perform with her running mate for the first time on Tuesday in Philadelphia, where the duo will kick off their tour across the country.
Her pace of travel is in stark contrast to the pace of Trump and President Joe Biden. Trump has given speeches in 10 states since the June 27 debate, while Biden has traveled to campaign sites in eight states in the final 24 days of his candidacy. Harris’ trip this week will take her to seven states in less than a quarter of the time.
Harris will visit five states that she and Biden turned blue in 2020: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona. She will also visit North Carolina, which Biden lost by a narrow margin, and Nevada, which Democrats won narrowly.
Democratic Party allies say the trip highlights the generation gap between Harris and Biden and Trump.
Biden’s candidacy has been dogged by voter concerns about his age, and his final weeks as the presumptive nominee have been marked by a flood of Democrats in Congress urging him to pass the torch to a new generation.
“Age really matters” when it comes to a candidate’s ability to commit to extended campaign travel, 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 at the end of his term.
“It’s 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 everybody’s in it,” she said. “And you can only keep that up for so long. And when you’re Trump’s age, I don’t know how you do that.”
Trump will hold a rally and deliver speeches at a dinner this Friday in Montana, a state he won in 2020 with 56.9% of the vote. He will also hold a fundraiser Saturday in Colorado, which Biden won by a similar margin in 2020. Neither state is considered a swing state.
Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, pointed out the overall difference in the number of campaign trips Trump and Harris make.
“This cycle, President Trump has by far visited more key states, held more rallies, hosted more fundraisers, given 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 presidential nominee.
“Kamala Harris can’t even do a basic media interview since she was anointed the Democratic nominee,” he continued. Harris hasn’t given a sit-down media interview since Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, though she has answered reporters’ questions in media gaggles.
In the days following Biden’s much-criticized June debate in Georgia, his campaign was in damage control mode. Biden spoke at a rally in North Carolina and traveled to fundraisers in New York, New Jersey and Virginia before holding 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. He dropped out of the race a few days later.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Abhi Rahman said that if Biden had stayed in the race, “there would have been such bombardments too.”
But now, “there’s absolutely a great need to make sure that the vice president defines herself and her VP before the Republicans have a chance,” Rahman said. “So the timing of this absolutely fits with that.”
When Biden was the presumptive nominee, the Trump campaign focused much of its attacks on his cognitive ability, playing on voters’ concerns about his age. But because Harris is a generation younger than Trump, Republicans have had to adjust their approach.
“I think she’s making a point of her relative youth and vitality,” said Bill Galston, a Brookings Institution fellow and an official in President Bill Clinton’s administration. “It’s a point she doesn’t have to talk about because she just shows it.”
Harris’ campaign swing is also consistent with how candidates typically pick up the pace as the election approaches, said Aleigha Cavalier, a Democratic strategist at the strategy and marketing firm Precision Strategies. But she said Harris’ pace of travel compared to Trump and Biden is “a real advantage.”
“I think the fact that she is willing and able to organize so many events in a short period of time can make a huge difference, especially with the election less than 100 days away,” 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 importantly, candidates activate thousands of “micro-influencers” at rallies, he said.
“They all hold up their phones and they’re all publishers,” he said, adding that when contestants post photos of themselves with a candidate, “that goes to their networks, which is a recommendation to their networks.”
“If you can get 10,000 people to say they trust Kamala Harris, that has impact as a form of media and communication in and of itself,” Jaye said. “So these are essentially micro-influencer conventions.”
Harris’ campaign has already touted the outpouring of support from volunteers. A memo released Saturday said volunteers made 2.3 million phone calls and knocked on 172,000 doors in the past 12 days.
The seven-state tour “shows that she has a lot of energy,” Renteria said. “It shows that her campaign is ready to go, that she’s thinking well and can execute well. So it’s super exciting.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
