Why Kamala Harris’s new strategy focuses on rural Georgia

On Wednesday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris will make her first big swing through Georgia with her running mate, Tim Walz.

President Joe Biden won the state in 2020 by the narrowest of margins. Democrats flipped the two Senate seats in the runoff races in 2021 and Raphael Warnock held his seat in the 2022 midterm. So it’s no surprise Harris is concentrating on the state today.

Democrats are also making a play for other Southern states like North Carolina and even Florida, which has become a laboratory for MAGA. Some polling shows that Harris has a slight lead there, while other surveys show a lead for Trump.

But the new wrinkle in Harris’s campaign strategy is that she is not just relying on the Atlanta metropolitian area and its suburbs, but the rural areas. Harris’s tour throughout South Georgia will begin on Wednesday.

On the surface, a Democrat campaigning in the rural areas may seem bizarre, given how much the party relies on cities and their suburbs. But Andrew Heaton, a former adviser on Warnock’s campaign, explained why it’s a strategic move for the Harris-Walz campaign to The Independent.

“If you want to win statewide in Georgia, as close as the margins are right now, it can't be an either/or,” he said. “Yes, the bulk of our votes are going to be in metro Atlanta. Yes, we have to run up the scores there — but we can't rely on that. We also have to turn out the votes and crank up the margins, especially in the areas in South Georgia.”

Specifically, Heaton said that Democrats need to compete in areas like the Black Belt, where numerous Black voters live and work in agriculture. He noted that Representative Sanford Bishop, a Black Democrat, represents part of the area.

“There are Democrats down there,”