Harris-Walz embark on bus tour in Pennsylvania before Chicago convention

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz embarked on a bus tour in southwestern Pennsylvania on Sunday, hoping to ride a wave of enthusiasm for her candidacy to their party's nominating convention in Chicago this week.

Vice President Harris and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, were joined by their spouses, Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, as they arrived at Pittsburgh International Airport and greeted supporters. They will make stops in the Pittsburgh area to glad-hand with voters.

Harris and Emhoff were scheduled to deliver remarks at an event in the borough of Rochester, in Beaver County, which Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, won in 2020. The stop came exactly four weeks after President Joe Biden Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris to replace him on the ticket.

Southwestern Pennsylvania is a critical part of a key battleground state that has long commanded the attention of presidential candidates. The state voted for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020. Both Harris and Trump are vying to see who can put Pennsylvania in their column on November 5.

Most polls, including the New York Times/Siena College poll and Fox News, find Harris and Trump locked in a tight race statewide.

Trump held a rally Saturday in Wilkes-Barre in the northeastern part of the state, following his earlier rallies in July in Harrisburg and Butler, where he survived an assassination attempt.

The bus tour marks Harris' eighth trip to Pennsylvania this year, and her second this month. The vice president's August 6 announcement that Walz would be her running mate came hours before their first joint appearance as a ticket later that day in Philadelphia.

This is a state that traditionally has been super important, but southwestern Pennsylvania has been really kind of the battleground part of the battleground state, said Kristin Kanthak, associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is a diverse county with urban, suburban and rural areas, and a lot of people who 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 per cent of the vote, while Trump won neighbouring Beaver County, which includes Rochester, with about 58 per cent 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 labour 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 US 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 US 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 reach out to voters in the state's southwestern region while she still has a great deal of momentum at her back" and spin up local media coverage.

She is going to garner a lot of that free media attention, Brown said. I believe their hope, right, 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 travelled 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 travelled by bus when they campaigned for a second term.

The Democratic National Convention opens Monday.