SAVANNAH, Georgia: US Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned across southern Georgia by bus 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. President Joe Biden had been on course to lose the southern state he flipped from Republican Trump in 2020, but since Harris replaced Biden as the candidate five weeks ago, the party has begun to hope it could win it again.

Both Harris and Trump are now ramping up their campaigns in seven key battleground states as an extraordinary — and 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,” Harris’ campaign said. Riding a wave of enthusiasm from the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris and running mate Tim Walz are traveling 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 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,” 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,” Harris encouraged a patron about the upcoming election.

The bus tour culminates with a rally 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 Walz.

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

But Harris has been content to let her campaign do the talking in the frenetic weeks since the 81-year-old Biden stunned the country by bowing out. She has reinvigorated the Democratic Party, raised more than half a billion dollars and wiped out Trump’s lead in the polls. 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 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. 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. Biden won it by a razor-thin margin of less than 12,000 votes in 2020, in a result that 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 Harris edging Trump in Georgia, 50 percent to 48 percent.

But Trump is also stepping up his swing state campaign as he seeks to recover his poise after being wrong-footed by new flag bearer Harris. The vice president is not only two decades younger than Trump and of Black and South Asian heritage, but vying to be the first female US president. Trump will be attacking Harris’ “dangerously liberal policies” Thursday in Michigan and Wisconsin, before traveling to Pennsylvania on Friday, the campaign said.

But his team was embroiled in controversy Wednesday after a report that Trump’s entourage shoved and verbally abused staff during a politicized visit to the United States’ most hallowed resting place for its war dead. National Public Radio reported that the incident happened when an Arlington National Cemetery official tried to prevent Trump aides from taking images in a section for those killed in recent wars, where filming and staging of political events is banned. – AFP