Band and BBQ: Harris-Walz bus tour makes stops in southeast Georgia
(WASHINGTON) — Coming off of a brief respite from the campaign trail after a star-studded week in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz are heading to Georgia for a two-day bus tour that ends with Harris holding a solo rally in Savannah on Thursday.
The tour marks the first time the two campaigns will be in the crucial swing state together, with a planned stop for their first sit-down interview since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket with CNN’s chief political correspondent and anchor Dana Bash on Thursday.
The tour’s first stop was at Liberty County High School, where Harris, Walz U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams and state Rep. Al Williams were greeted by the school’s principal and superintendent, before listening in on the school marching band’s practice. In remarks to the band and football players, Harris told them that they were leaders that the country is counting on.
“We wanted to come up just to let you know that our country is counting on you. We’re so proud of you,” she said. “You are showing what hard work can achieve.”
Walz, a former teacher and football coach, told the students that education is a path to the middle class.
“Education is the key to the middle class,” he said. “The pathway to the middle class shouldn’t be burdened with debt given the opportunity to get there. This is truly about building towards the future, and you’re that future.”
The pair later stopped at Sandfly BBQ in Savannah, where Walz chatted with a group of teachers, telling them their job is “noble work.”
Although there is no notable post-convention polling that has been released to date, the campaign saw a bump in donations of $82 million during the week of the DNC, bringing the total haul since launching her candidacy last month to $540 million, her campaign said.
Hoping to build on that momentum, Harris and Walz are scheduled to travel through Georgia’s southeast where they will meet with supporters, small business owners and Georgia voters, according to the campaign. It will be their second bus tour after they previously went on a bus tour through western Pennsylvania before the DNC.
The Harris campaign is looking to sway voters in battleground Georgia — a state President Joe Biden only narrowly won in 2020, beating former President Donald Trump by about 12,000 votes.
Currently, Harris is neck-and-neck with Trump in the polls in the state, according to 538’s average. Trump barely leads in Georgia with 46.6% compared to Harris’ 46%, 538’s polling average shows.
“Campaigning in southern Georgia is critical as it represents a diverse coalition of voters, including rural, suburban, and urban Georgians — with a large proportion of Black voters and working class families,” said Harris-Walz Georgia state director Porsha White in a memo.
This is all in addition to their 35,000 new volunteers, as well as more than 190 Democratic campaign staffers in 24 coordinated offices across the state, officials said.
Through extensive “Get Out the Vote” organizing efforts, Black voters were a huge contributing factor to Biden’s win in a state that former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had all but skipped during their presidential runs.
Harris’ tour is a testament that the campaign still feels like Georgia’s 16 electoral votes are in play.
“We turned Georgia blue for the first time in three decades in 2020, and we’re seizing on the energy and putting in the work to win again in 2024,” White said in the memo.
A Harris spokeswoman told ABC News said that the vice president will make two stops at local small businesses in South Georgia on Thursday, then thank volunteers in Chatham County, before rallying in Savannah late in the afternoon.
Walz, meanwhile, will travel to North Carolina for a “local political event” and a campaign reception.
Following CNN’s interview, Walz will head to Massachusetts for a solo rally on Thursday. Voters will see Harris, Walz and their spouses — second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, respectively — on the trail again for a Labor Day blitz across several battleground states prior to ABC News’ debate on Sept. 10.
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have now kicked off their ad war with both of their campaigns launching major eight-figure ad campaigns targeting each other in key battleground states.
The Harris campaign this week is launching a $50 million three-week ad blitz through the Democratic National Convention next month, with the first ad of her campaign introducing the vice president to voters, highlighting her career and taking hits at her Republican opponent, the campaign announced.
The Trump campaign too has launched its first major television ad in battleground states attacking Harris since as least January, reserving at least $12 million worth of airtime this week, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact.
Trump’s 30-second ad, released by the his campaign, zeroes in on the former president’s ongoing rhetoric that Harris “failed” as President Joe Biden’s border czar, calling her “weak” and “dangerously liberal.”
“This is America’s border czar, and she’s failed us. Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here, a quarter of a million Americans dead from fentanyl, brutal migrant crimes, and ISIS now here,” a narrator in the ad says, followed by an interview clip of Harris appearing to admit she hasn’t visited the border.
“Kamala Harris. Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal,” the narration continues.
According to AdImpact, the Trump campaign has reserved $12 million worth of airtime across Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin.
After a week of working to determine the best language to attack Harris since Biden left the 2024 race, this ad campaign reflects the Trump campaign’s push to focus on the border — a major campaign issue for voters.
In response to the Trump campaign’s ad, the Harris campaign suggests that the vice president was focused on addressing the root causes of migration and claimed that at no point in her tenure was she in charge of managing the border.
Harris’ first ad, titled “Fearless” and featuring pictures of Harris over the years — from a toddler to college graduate to vice president — highlights her background as a former prosecutor who is “uniquely suited to take on” the former president, who is now a convicted felon.
“As a prosecutor, she put murderers and abusers behind bars,” a narrator says in the one-minute ad. “As California’s attorney general, she went after the big banks and won $20 billion for homeowners. And as vice president, she took on the big drug companies to cap the cost of insulin for seniors. Because Kamala Harris has always known who she represents.”
The spot then leads into laying out Harris’ vision and attacking Trump, using footage from her first rally of the campaign last week in a high school gym just outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead. Where every senior can retire with dignity,” Harris said in the footage from the rally. “But Donald Trump wants to take our country backward, to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and end the Affordable Care Act.”
This ad is scheduled to run on local and national broadcast, cable programming, streaming and social channels over the next three weeks, including during the Olympic Games, as well as programs like “The Bachelorette,” “Big Brother” and “The Daily Show.”
The Harris campaign has reserved airtime in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, according to ad tracking firm Medium Buying.
(WASHINGTON) — Taylor Swift made headlines after Tuesday night’s debate by endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and experts are already looking at the pop star’s possible influence on the 2024 election.
“If you self-identify as someone who sees the world like Taylor Swift does, you might go, ‘Huh, maybe I should be voting like that also,'” Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan and author of the book For the Culture, told ABC News. “It sort of sends a bat signal for what potentially is acceptable for people like me.”
“This sort of social signaling is important to us,” he continued. “It helps us define who we are, our identity, what to think, how to behave.”
These effects can be subtle but significant, Collins said. For example, a conservative Swiftie might find those two identities at odds with each other and begin to question their beliefs.
“People may find themselves in cognitive dissonance, where their identity and how they see the world are in conflict with other parts of their identity,” he said. “There has to be some sense of reconciliation.”
The pop superstar said Tuesday night that she would be voting for Harris “because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”
Swift said she was voting for the Harris-Tim Walz ticket after doing her research and, in her post, encouraged her Instagram followers to do their own. She also shared a link to Vote.org, a resource to help people register to vote in their home state.
“She knows that she’s speaking to a number of people who will be voting either for the first time ever or for the first time for a president,” Megan Duncan, an associate professor at Virginia Tech specializing in political communication, told ABC News. “And she knows that getting that bit of education about how to register and that you can vote early in many states is the stuff that celebrities are effective at.”
This isn’t the first time Swift has encouraged her fans to register to vote. In 2018 and 2023, she also made Instagram posts about voter registration, and tens of thousands of people signed up in the days that followed.
Swift’s support for Harris shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Though once publicly apolitical, Swift has become more outspoken about her political beliefs in recent years. In 2020, she endorsed President Joe Biden and lambasted then-President Donald Trump for “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism” and putting “millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.”
Fans had long anticipated her making an endorsement in the 2024 race. Much of her fanbase is young — predominately millennials and Gen Z — a demographic that consistently has lower voter turnout than older generations and whose members may have never voted.
It’s not just young people Swift is in a position to sway. Many of her fans belong to another critical demographic: white women, over half of whom voted red in both 2016 and 2020.
“It’s a huge voter block — and not only that, but it’s a voter block that we’ve seen be consequential with regards to elections, particularly with Donald Trump,” Collins told ABC News.
How Swift’s endorsement will shape the election is yet to be seen, but her message’s reach has already been massive. The General Services Administration told ABC News that, as of 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, more than 330,000 people had visited the voter registration site linked by Swift.
Not long after Swift’s endorsement, a spokesperson for the vice president said Harris was “very proud” to have the singer’s support and said it came as a complete surprise.
(WASHINGTON) — Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance defended his past comments on women and families without children, the Trump campaign’s proposals to deport undocumented immigrants and more in a wide-ranging interview with “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl, which airs in full on Sunday morning.
Despite the race tightening in recent weeks as Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over the Democratic ticket, the Ohio senator emphasized that he and Trump are “extremely confident” in their chances of winning the election.
“I think we’re going to win. I also think that we have to work as hard as possible for the remainder of the election to try to persuade Americans to vote for us,” Vance told Karl. “That’s the name of the game.”
Vance elaborates on ‘pro-family’ views
The senator has come under fire for repeated comments made about childless Americans, including one during an interview in July 2021 with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson where Vance described leading Democrats including Harris as “childless cat ladies.”
In a speech before a conservative group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which preceded that interview, Vance also suggested that people with children should have extra votes.
“The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds, but let’s do this instead,” Vance said in the speech. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power.”
Vance told Karl his notion was a “thought experiment” in response to Democratic proposals to allow younger voters, and not a policy stance.
“Do I regret saying it? I regret that the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has, frankly, distorted what I said,” he said. “They turn this into a policy proposal that I never made. … I said, I want us to be more pro-family, and I do want us to be more pro-family.”
Vance added there are “policy positions behind my view that the country should become more pro-family.” He went on to talk about the economic struggles that families are facing, citing the increased cost of goods, rising medical bills and other costs.
The senator said that he and Trump have a plan to lower the cost of housing and food but didn’t provide details during the interview.
Trump said in an interview with Fox News last week that his solution to bringing down costs was, “We’re gonna drill, baby, drill.”
Trump has also advocated for more tariffs and tax cuts as part of his economic policies.
Vance responds to mass deportation plan: ‘Let’s start with 1 million’
The senator brought up the ongoing migrant crisis and again blamed Harris and the Biden administration’s policies, such as ending “Remain in Mexico.”
When asked how he and Trump would accomplish their stated goal of mass deporting as many as 20 million immigrants – a proposal experts previously told ABC News would be a “nightmare” — Vance said they would take a “sequential approach.”
“I mean do you go knock on doors and ask people for their papers? What do you do,” Karl asked.
“You start with what’s achievable,” Vance said. “I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and frankly if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem.”
“I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million. That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there,” Vance said.
Vance agrees with Trump that VP picks don’t matter to most voters During an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago last month, and just a short time after Trump announced Vance as his running mate, the former president raised some eyebrows when asked whether Vance would be ready to be president “on Day 1” if needed.
“You can have a vice president who’s outstanding in every way, and I think JD is, I think that all of them would’ve been, but you’re not voting that way. You’re voting for the president. You’re voting for me,” Trump said, without addressing whether Vance would be ready on “Day 1.”
In the interview with ABC News, Vance said he agreed with Trump’s view.
“They’re voting for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris, not for JD or Tim Walz,” he said. “I also think that he’s right that the politics of this really don’t matter that much.”
However, Vance stressed he’s “absolutely” sure Trump is confident he could step up as a commander in chief if needed.
“What I think that he does believe because he made it the main focus of his vetting process, is, ‘Do I think this person can be president on day one if, God forbid, something happens? Yes,'” Vance said.
Vance repeats false claims about Tim Walz’s policies
During a rally in Montana on Friday night, Trump pushed falsehoods about Democratic vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz’s policies concerning transgender youth, accusing the Minnesota governor of signing “a law letting the state kidnap children to change their gender.”
Walz has signed legislation aimed at protecting the rights of transgender individuals to access gender-affirming care, which can include gender-affirming surgeries but also services like counseling and non-surgical medical procedures like hormone therapy and puberty suppressants. The law does not allow what Trump claimed.
Vance said he didn’t fully watch the late-night rally but repeated some of those false claims in the interview with Karl, saying Walz “supported taking children away from their parents if the parents don’t consent to gender reassignment.”
He referenced Walz’s recent statement at a rally accusing Republicans of not “minding their own damn business.”
“One way of minding your own damn business, Jon, is to not try to take my children away from me … if I have different world views than you.”
Karl pushed back, calling the “kidnapping” characterization “crazy.”
The April 2023 law that Walz signed in the wake of other states curtailing or banning access to gender-affirming care has been mischaracterized by Republicans.
The Minnesota law protects patients who come to the state to receive gender-affirming health care, even if the patients live in a state where such care is illegal. The law also specifically allows the state’s courts to assume “temporary emergency jurisdiction” in cross-state child custody disputes where a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming care and is in Minnesota to do so.
The executive director of LGBTQ+ advocacy group OutFront told The Washington Post that under the law, courts can settle parental disputes over whether their child should get this care, but it doesn’t result in the parent against such care losing custody of their child.
Vance pushes back on white supremacist Trump once dined with who recently insulted his wife’s race
Karl also asked Vance about a racist attack targeting his wife, Usha, from white nationalist live-streamer, Nick Fuentes, who Trump dined with in November 2022.
In a recent livestream, Fuentes said, “What kind of man marries somebody named Usha Clearly, he doesn’t value his racial identity.”
“My attitude to these people attacking my wife is, she’s beautiful, she’s smart. What kind of man marries Usha A very smart man and very lucky man,” Vance said of his wife during the ABC News interview. “If these guys want to attack me or attack my views, my policy views, [or] my personality, come after me. But don’t attack my wife. She’s out of your league.”
Trump faced significant blowback for dining with Fuentes, along with rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) back in November 2022 at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. At the time, Trump said he did not know who Fuentes was and that he was brought to the dinner by Ye. In a statement given exclusively to Fox News Digital, Trump said, “I had no idea what his views were, and they weren’t expressed at the table in our very quick dinner, or it wouldn’t have been accepted.”
But the former president has not denounced Fuentes’ white nationalist views beyond that, or the recent comments about Usha Vance.
In the interview, Vance contended Trump had “issued plenty of condemnations,” and did not question the former president’s dinner with Fuentes.
“The one thing I like about Donald Trump, Jon, is that he actually will talk to anybody. But just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views,” Vance said, adding that Trump has been close and friendly with his family.
ABC News’ Quinn Scanlan contributed to this report.