There were big groups, long lines of applause, sounds of happiness, and some unwanted Republican counterprogramming.
These ideas came up a lot during Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s first big campaign swing. This past week, the new Democratic ticket went on a “get to know us” tour of five key states.
They started with a loud gathering in Philadelphia on Tuesday, just a few hours after Harris named Walz as her running mate. After that, they marched through Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Tropical Storm Debby canceled stops that were supposed to happen in Georgia and North Carolina.
As part of the trip, both candidates got to know voters, especially independent and undecided voters in states where the Democrats are in close races against Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
It also helped Harris and Walz get to know each other better.
A look back at the back end of the campaign:
Size does matter
A lot of people have been showing up to Harris’ campaign events, which shows that her innovative candidacy has given Democrats who weren’t excited about President Joe Biden’s reelection bid new energy. Harris is the first person of Asian descent and the first Black woman to be nominated for president by a major party.
The campaign says that 12,000 people showed up to protests in Philadelphia and Eau Claire, Wisconsin. As many as 15,000 people were in the Detroit area and Glendale, Arizona. On Saturday in Las Vegas, more than 12,000 people were inside a university center when admissions were stopped because people were getting sick while waiting outside in 109-degree heat to go through security. The group said that there were still about 4,000 people in line when the doors shut.
Lance Jones, who was born and raised in Tucson and went to the Arizona rally, said he felt like “the tables have turned with Harris and Walz.” He said that his mood “is going from pretty much red to purple to blue.”
Trump is used to having thousands of people at his events, so those numbers made him mad. When asked about Harris at a news gathering, he said, “Oh, give me a break.” “No one has had as many people as I have.”
Republican response plans
Instead of staying out of it, the Republican ticket got involved. Vance even tried to follow his Democratic opponents around on their first few days of the tour. There were events he held in Philadelphia and Detroit hours before the Democrats got there.
Harris and Vance arrived in Eau Claire around the same time on Wednesday, but Harris got off his plane first and walked toward Air Force Two.
In a later joke, Vance said he did the move to “check out my future plane” and had “a bit of fun” with it. He would mostly use Air Force Two to get around if he and Trump win in November.
Speeches from the stump
From one rally to the next, Harris and Walz gave mostly the same speeches, which were heavy on personal stories. They did make a few changes to fit the crowd and state, though.
Harris added some words to her speech in Michigan about fighting for workers and the good things about organized labor. She told the crowd that when she was attorney general of California, she went after transnational gangs, drug groups, and people smugglers. This was because she had been a prosecutor before. This was important in Arizona and Nevada because of the migration problem. “I went after them in case after case and won,” Harris said.
In Las Vegas, where the tourism industry is very important to the business, she promised to work to get rid of federal taxes on tips for people who work in restaurants and other service industries. Trump said on social media that she was a “copycat” because he had brought up the same idea a few months before.
At the end of her meetings, Harris asked people what kind of country they wanted to live in. She then told them to get involved and said, “When we fight, we win.”
Walz told a personal story about his time in the Army National Guard, as a high school teacher and football coach, as a member of Congress, and as governor. He is mostly unknown outside of the Midwest. He talks about how he and his wife, Gwen, went through years of painful in vitro fertilization treatments before their daughter, Hope, was born as part of a campaign to restore reproductive rights.
Get to the applause lines
Everyone running has lines that get people excited:
Listen to what Harris says: “I know Donald Trump’s type.” This is the type of person Harris went after as a lawyer.
“Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business,” Walz says. This is how people in the Midwest make private, personal decisions like whether to have an abortion.
“We’ll sleep when we’re dead,” Walz says, telling people to give the campaign their all for as many days as there are left.
The new words are “joy” and “weird.”
Walz used both words in the campaign. People heard him call Trump, Vance, and their ideas “weird” before he even ran for office as a Democrat. Harris herself used the word a few times. As Walz puts it, “No one wants that weird stuff.”
Walz also says that Harris “brought back the joy” to politics. Harris herself called the Democratic ticket “joyful warriors.”
“Keep him locked up”
The crowd started shouting “lock him up” at several stops, aimed at Trump. This was similar to the chants that Trump’s campaign supporters used against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Harris is always ready to make things better. “Hold on.” That should be handled by the courts. “In November, we’ll beat him,” she says.
She also knew what to say when protesters got in the way because they didn’t think the government was doing enough to protect Palestinians during Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. She told them in Arizona, “I like what you have to say, but we need to talk about this race in 2024.”
Who’s keeping track?
Walz told people at each stop that the time to vote was running out, on November 5.
The countdown was wrong by one day when he set it at 87 days instead of 88. By Friday in Phoenix, it must have all been a dream.
Other people are also counting. There were 90 days until the election, but on Wednesday, a group of Girl Scouts met the vice president at the airport in Wisconsin. Reporters heard parts of their conversation that made it sound like they might have been talking about plans for the summer. Harris was heard to say, “In 90 days, I’m planning to go somewhere.”
Bonus stop
Harris made one more stop on Sunday in San Francisco before going back to Washington, D.C. It was all about getting campaign money for the next fight.
House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was also going to the event with Harris. The campaign said it would have more than 700 people and had already raised more than $12 million.
