This is interesting territory for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be traversing and a very interesting time to be doing it.
A couple of weeks ago, Charles Hayslett suggested on his Trouble in God’s Country blog that with high school football ramping up, Walz might consider rounding up some of the members of the 1999 Mankato West team that won their state championship and doing a bus tour across South Georgia, possibly ending in Blackshear, home of Stetson Bennett and the current 2A state champion team.
Whoever’s ear that idea might have reached, or whether the idea came from another direction, what’s being planned for this week is like the state champ tour on steroids. Both Harris and Walz are planning a two-day bus tour across South Georgia, culminating in a rally in Savannah on Thursday night. Along with JD Vance’s visit to Valdosta last week, this should make long-neglected South Georgia the most hotly contested area, for the fewest votes, of any in the country.
The best the Democratic ticket can hope for with this trip is to narrow the margin in a solidly red region that has supported Trump in the last two presidential elections. From a larger perspective, the bus tour could send a powerful message that the party is contesting the election across both red and blue America.
This is also an area where Gov. Brian Kemp has won by double-digit margins, although recently, he’s come in for criticism over plans to supply the massive new Hyundai plant in Bryan County with 7 million gallons of water a day from neighboring Bulloch County. Given the governor’s currently on-again relationship with Donald Trump, he might show the GOP flag south of Macon this week.
Or not.
This will be a true test of retail, one-on-one politicking for the Democratic candidates. There’s no way they’re going to draw huge crowds where they’re going. Instead they’ll have to depend on personal interactions caught on video to justify such a large investment of time this close with only weeks to go in the presidential race.
This could be a blessing in a paradoxical way. There have been reports that the enthusiastic Democratic National Convention in Chicago was also a COVID super spreader event. Whether that turns out to have been the case, a new COVID variant, less lethal but with the potential to disrupt a lot of plans, is on the rise across the country. Those long stretches of South Georgia highway will give Harris more time to get ready for her Sept. 10 debate with Trump or for what to say if Trump backs out.
This is a region that has a lot in common with other rural areas that have fallen behind in the 21st-century economy, plus a lot more gnats than most of them. Hayslett’s blog is a must-read for understanding how the economic metrics of rural Georgia have moved in the opposite direction from Metro Atlanta. There are some black-majority counties, which could be a stage for encouraging African-American turnout across the country.
One objective of the tour will be to show off the impressive number of volunteers who have joined the campaign since Harris became the party’s presidential nominee. Somewhere on the yet-to-be-announced route to Savannah, however, we’re likely to see the first stories announcing a possible slump in the energy of the Harris-Walz campaign.
Likely, that is, not because of anything the campaign’s going to do, but because, somewhere on the road to Savannah, the media’s itch for a new angle will become too great. Michelle Obama sternly warned Democrats last week that the convention’s glow can last only so long. The outcome of this razor-thin race will depend on whether her warning is heeded.
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