This week, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz went boldly where no major presidential campaign has gone in several decades… Savannah, Georgia.
This is a big deal because it signals the Harris-Walz campaign is not relying solely on running up vote totals in heavily Democratic Atlanta and its nearby suburbs; Democrats are also trying to narrow the margins in the more conservative, rural areas. In those locations, it is not about actually winning whole towns or counties; it's about losing them by less.
The strategy reminds me of how Barack Obama approached the Iowa caucuses in 2007 and his 2004 Senate campaign before that. He showed up in both blue counties and blue cities and in rural counties, small towns and places where many people were surprised to see him.
This was also the strategy Sen. Raphael Warnock implemented in 2020 and 2022 in Georgia. Warnock's former campaign manager Quentin Folks is now Harris' principal deputy campaign manager. A rural Georgia native, Folks recently said, "You have to really stave down margins and go places even when you don't think you can win it outright… You know you're going to lose that county, but just showing up there can sometimes be the difference between 5 to 10 percentage points, or sometimes just putting an office there."
One bus tour does not win an election, but it does show a willingness by the Harris-Walz campaign to meet people where they are and to put in the work of showing up. As much as politics has changed over the last several years, it turns out there's still value in a good old fashioned bus tour.
Read more exclusive insights from Jen Psaki here. And tune into "Inside with Jen Psaki" Mondays at 8 p.m. ET, and Sundays at 12 p.m. ET on MSNBC.
