Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is headed to Georgia on Tuesday to campaign for Kamala Harris, his first solo visit to the critical battleground state since accepting the nomination.
A campaign official said the Minnesota governor will visit Macon and Atlanta on Tuesday for a political event. It’s his second stop in Georgia this campaign cycle, following a late August bus tour with Harris that visited several coastal Georgia stops. No further details are yet available.
Harris and former President Donald Trump are narrowing their focus on Georgia and a half-dozen other competitive states as the November election nears. U.S. Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running-mate, will headline a conservative gala in Cobb County on Monday.
The visits are part of a blitz of stops in swing states after the debate in Philadelphia, which marks the start of a sprint toward November. Early voting in Georgia starts on Oct. 15, and the rival parties are intensifying their get-out-the-vote efforts.
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Polls show a tight race in Georgia, which narrowly voted Democrat in 2020 for the first time in nearly three decades. Both campaigns have opened offices around the state, hired dozens of staffers and launched new volleys of TV attacks and digital ads targeting undecided Georgia voters.
The back-to-back visits by Walz and Vance come days after a mass school shooting in Barrow County that left two teachers and two students dead and brought the issue of gun violence back to the forefront of the race. A 14-year-old student is charged with using a semiautomatic weapon to carry out the attack.
Democrats have condemned Vance for responding to the shooting last week by saying: “I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.”
Walz, a former high school social studies teacher and educator, sharply criticized Vance’s remarks about the Georgia shooting at the annual dinner for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group.
“It’s a fact of life that some people are gay,” Walz told the audience. “But you know what’s not a fact of life? Our children being shot dead in schools.”
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