by Kim Lyons, Pennsylvania Capital-Star
The day before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will kick off a bus tour of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh on Sunday, the campaign announced. It will be the pair’s first campaign appearance in western Pennsylvania, after Harris introduced Walz at a rally in Philadelphia on Aug. 6. They’ll be joined by their spouses Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz.
The campaign said the tour would focus on “meeting voters where they are” in community settings, with stops to include canvassing kick off events and local retail stops.
Harris officially became the Democrats’ presidential nominee earlier this month by a roll call vote of Democratic National Committee delegates, after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid last month and endorsed her.
This will be Harris’ eighth visit to Pennsylvania this year, and her 18th visit since being sworn into office, the campaign said. She appeared in the commonwealth on July 13 in Philadelphia to court Asian-American voters and has also made stops this cycle in Pittsburgh to tout the administration’s infrastructure investments, in Philadelphia to talk student debt with educators, and in Montgomery County to speak in support of reproductive rights.
The campaign said it now has 36 coordinated offices and nearly 300 staffers on the ground across Pennsylvania, and in the four weeks since Harris announced her candidacy, more than 43,000 people have signed up to volunteer for the campaign in Pennsylvania.
Although he visited the eastern half of the state several times in 2024, Biden only made one 2024 campaign stop in western Pennsylvania, visiting the United Steelworkers in April ahead of the state’s primary election.
Former President Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP nominee for president, will campaign in Wilkes-Barre on Saturday for a rally at the Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza. The visit will be Trump’s seventh to the Keystone State in 2024, but his first to northeast Pennsylvania this cycle. Trump appeared in Harrisburg for a rally on July 31, his first visit to Pennsylvania following an assassination attempt during a rally in Butler on July 13.
A Times-Siena poll released Aug. 10 shows Harris leading Trump by four percentage points in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
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</a>Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.
The Pennsylvania Capital-Star is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site dedicated to honest and aggressive coverage of state government, politics and policy.
The nearly 13 million people who call the commonwealth home depend on their interests being safeguarded by one of the nation’s largest, most expensive, and often inefficient and corrupt full-time state legislatures. The actions of the legislative, executive and judicial branches touch on almost every aspect of Pennsylvanians’ daily lives.
Since our launch in February 2019, the Capital-Star has emerged as a go-to source for in-depth original reporting, explainers on complex topics, features that ground policy debates, as well as progressive commentary on a range of issues.