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PITTSBURGH — Kamala Harris knows where her weaknesses are — and she’s steering her campaign bus straight at them.
The vice president isn’t focusing only on big, Democratic strongholds like Milwaukee, Atlanta and Philadelphia. She’s traveling to smaller cities like Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Savannah, Georgia, too.
And in Pennsylvania, over the last week alone, Harris has not only attended the debate in Philly but gone to Johnstown, a small city in a deep-red expanse; Wilkes-Barre, in a white working-class county that was once reliably Democratic before flipping to former President Donald Trump; and Pittsburgh, a mostly white city surrounded by GOP-friendly areas.
After Trump’s victory in 2016, Democrats forged a deliberate strategy of trying to limit their losses in Republican-leaning areas. But President Joe Biden strayed from that approach earlier this year, focusing mainly on major cities as he tried to repair his problems with the Democratic base. Now, a POLITICO analysis shows, Harris is returning her attention to a different set of redder areas — in campaign swings and advertising — a shift that underscores her unique strengths and challenges relative to him.
The campaign is less concerned now about locking up the Democratic base, eschewing the need to focus quite as heavily on major liberal cities like Philly. Instead, Harris’ team sees room to grow among many of the types of voters located in the smaller cities, exurban locales and rural areas that she is now visiting: older, mostly non-college-educated, white voters.
Harris has expanded on Biden’s favored events in Philadelphia and dedicated a significant portion of her resources on other parts of the state. In fact, Harris has clocked more stops in western Pennsylvania in the first six weeks of her candidacy than Biden did in the entire six months prior.
“There are voters who need to hear a bit more about the vice president who simply do not know her the way they knew Joe Biden,” said Dan Kanninen, Harris’ battleground states director. “We need to fill that knowledge gap for folks and make sure they understand who she is, what she stands for, and that she’s fighting for all Americans.”
Harris is campaigning in places Biden had not. Just look at Pennsylvania.
Harris’ expanded focus is particularly evident in Pennsylvania, which the vice president has barnstormed more than any other battleground — and polls show a tight race.
In a bus tour that took place ahead of the Democratic National Convention, she visited the conservative Beaver County and Pittsburgh’s suburbs. And her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, went to the traditionally Republican Lancaster County, rural Fayette County, the bellwether Erie County and Pittsburgh in a two-day swing earlier this month.
Her face-off with Trump took place in Philadelphia. But it was Pittsburgh where she spent several days preparing and participating in mock debates — and garnering local news coverage.
More than two decades younger than Biden, Harris has the energy to maintain a much more vigorous schedule criss-crossing the battleground states. And Harris and Biden aides argued that some of the difference can be explained by the election calendar: Earlier in the cycle, presidential candidates must unite their base. They later turn to winning over swing voters, and Biden would have ultimately gone to these places, too, they said.
Harris staffers note they aren’t ignoring Philly and its suburbs, which have moved to the left. Half of Harris’ ad spending in the state has been dedicated to Philadelphia’s media market, though that is a slight dip from Biden’s 57 percent. And in August, Harris chose the city to mark her first rally with Walz.
But the campaign has spent more of its in-state ad budget in the smaller markets of Johnstown, Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg and Erie than it did when Biden was the candidate, according to data from AdImpact, which tracks political advertising.
Harris’ team believes that she can win over enough voters in swing counties and rural areas by touting her plans to fight price gouging, lower prescription drug costs and restore abortion rights to make a significant difference in the state. They also think she can appeal to some of them with a message about preventing chaos in the White House.
Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College, said Harris’ strategy made sense given how the electorate shifted once she took over the campaign.
While polling data across the state’s regions is limited, Yost said Harris appeared to quickly shore up support in the urban centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But he said Harris has shown vulnerabilities elsewhere, particularly in exurban areas, such as Biden’s birthplace of Lackawanna County and the next-door Luzerne.
“It looks like that’s sort of where she might be struggling a little bit compared to Biden,” Yost said. “That’s where the older white voters that we talk so much about reside in larger portions.”
Harris’ strategy is one Democrats have been honing since 2016
When Trump shattered the Blue Wall in 2016 with the help of working-class white voters who had previously backed former President Barack Obama, it shook the Democratic Party.
Four years later, Biden campaigned and advertised in regions that Hillary Clinton had been accused of ignoring. In Pennsylvania, that meant places like Erie, a hard-to-reach swing county that Trump flipped in 2016. And it worked: Biden won it back.
“What you see is the vice president, yes, learning lessons from winning presidential campaigns, even presidential campaigns that may not have been from our party,” said Harris confidant Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.).
Trump’s campaign dismisses the potential power of Harris’ strategy. The former president is looking to run up the score in rural counties that have heavily backed him since his first campaign, and his team points to Trump’s support for farmers, confrontational approach toward China and trade deals as points of appeal for rural and blue-collar workers.
“Harris can try to rewrite history, but it’s too little, too late — rural voters are tired of being failed by Democrats, and they are lining up to support President Trump,” said Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly.
Trump has also tried to turn white voters and men against Harris by deploying racist and sexist tropes about her. Harris has attempted to shut down his efforts, calling his attacks the “same old, tired playbook.”
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), a Trump ally who represents part of western Pennsylvania, said Harris’ travel comes from a place of weakness: “Trump is more — with the way he talks — he’s more Pittsburgh than I think the vice president would be. I think she comes across as a Californian.”
Other Democrats have been using the lose-by-less strategy in recent elections — and winning key states.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. John Fetterman, whose motto was “Every County, Every Vote,” both employed versions of that strategy in the 2022 midterms. Shapiro’s running mate, Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, said Harris is “following the playbook.”
“You really have to traverse the entire state and engage everyone, and even particularly in places where it’s not easy to be a Democrat,” he said. “You can lose there, but you can’t lose by a crazy margin.”
Harris’ staffing is built on that strategy. Brendan McPhillips, who worked in 2020 as Biden’s Pennsylvania state director and managed Fetterman’s run in 2022, is now a senior Harris campaign adviser in the state. And Quentin Fulks, her principal deputy campaign manager, ran Sen. Raphael Warnock’s 2022 campaign, which made a similar bet on rural voters.
“This is the strategy that Rev. Warnock used. I truly believe a lot of the reason that Joe Biden won Georgia was because of the outreach of those Senate races and work in rural counties to get those margins just a little bit higher,” said Pete Fuller, the chair of the Democratic Party in rural Jackson County, Georgia.
Biden won around 20 percent of the vote in Jackson County in 2020, up from 16 percent for Clinton in 2016.
Harris has devoted a greater share of her ad money to markets outside of Atlanta than Biden did in Georgia. Harris’ visit to southern Georgia last month was the first presidential stop in Savannah since Bill Clinton stumped there in 1992. And the campaign has sought to appeal to rural voters in the state by highlighting Republican proposals to cut benefits for farmers.
Demographic differences mean the non-urban outreach strategy reaches different types of voters in Sun Belt states than Rust Belt ones. Rural and exurban areas in states like Georgia have voted Republican for longer and are more racially diverse. That means the strategy involves engaging Democratic-inclined voters in heavily Republican areas, including rural Black voters, more than flipping back white voters who only recently left the Democratic Party.
What ties the battleground strategy together: a focus on voters outside of traditional party strongholds.
“She’s being smart. My district in western PA, I think, is the center of the political universe in a presidential election year,” said Democratic Rep. Chris Deluzio. “Those votes could make the difference in November.”
