Harris to rally in Georgia as campaign looks to builds on enthusiasm

Vice President Harris will head to Georgia on Tuesday for a rally in Atlanta as her campaign seeks to build on a wave of grassroots enthusiasm in the week since she became the likely Democratic nominee for president.

Harris will rally in front of thousands of voters, who campaign communications director Michael Tyler said will hear the vice president “continue to lay out her vision where we move forward, not backwards” and “call on Georgians to take action to make their voices heard in November.”

Harris will be joined by Georgia Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, as well former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, campaign officials said on a call with reporters. She is also scheduled to meet with local reproductive rights leaders and activists.

It will be Harris’s 15th trip to Georgia since she became vice president, but her first since President Biden announced he was stepping aside as the party’s nominee ahead of November’s election. Biden won the state in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes, and campaign officials said they are expecting it to be similarly competitive in a race between Harris and former President Trump.

The vice president’s campaign is looking to capitalize on a groundswell of support over the past week. It raised more than $200 million since Biden stepped aside nine days ago, and it has signed up more than 170,000 new volunteers, Dan Kanninen, director of battleground operations for the Harris campaign, told reporters.

Following a weekend in which the campaign engaged tens of thousands of voters at more than 3,200 events, officials are touting a “week of action” focused on abortion and reproductive rights.

“This election is going to be incredibly close, so this campaign is getting to work in taking nothing for granted,” Tyler told reporters.

A slew of polls released in the days after Biden dropped out of the race showed a close race between Trump and Harris, with the vice president narrowly trailing the former president in key battleground states but within the margin of error in many surveys.