Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, dropped in on a high school band practice Wednesday as part of a two-day bus tour through southeast Georgia, a crucial battleground state that Democrats just narrowly won four years ago.
Harris and Walz paid a visit to Liberty County High School in Hinesville, listening to the marching band perform its school fight song and delivering brief remarks to students and faculty on the first day of their Georgia swing, which will end in a rally in Savannah on Thursday night.
"We're so proud of you and we're counting on you," Harris told the students. "Your generation ... is what is going to propel our country into the next era of what we can do and what we can be."
Harris told the students that she also played in a school band – an aide said the vice president played the French horn, xylophone, and kettle drums.
The visit is part of a two-pronged strategy by the Harris-Walz campaign to make inroads in GOP strongholds and to use smaller, more intimate settings to showcase a softer side of the ticket, which is still relatively unknown by the electorate.
Campaign officials believe that in order to defeat Republican Donald Trump in the state, they will need more than Atlanta and the suburbs that delivered for Joe Biden in 2020.
Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said bus tours offer an "opportunity to get to places we don't usually go [and] make sure we're competing in all communities."
The campaign wants the events to motivate voters in GOP-leaning areas who don't traditionally see the candidates and hopes that the engagements drive viral moments that cut through crowded media coverage to reach voters across the country.
Harris and Walz also stopped at Sandfly, a barbecue restaurant outside Savannah, where some of the patrons were teachers. One thanked Walz, a former high school teacher.
After the stop at Sandfly, a Savannah Police Department motorcycle officer who was part of the motorcade appeared to wreck, the Savannah Morning News reported. The officer was seen lying on the road surrounded by fellow officers with a motorcycle several yards in front of him.
The cause of the accident is unknown and occurred at the Veterans Parkway exit of Interstate 516. Harris and Walz arrived at the Westin Hotel on Hutchinson Island shortly after, concluding Wednesday's portion of the bus tour.
It looks like a regular campaign bus, but this one is an armored U.S. Secret Service vehicle driven by agents that comes with lights and sirens and secure communications. After the first stop, Harris shifted back to her traditional SUV, the bus relegated to the back of the motorcade.
Tyler said the campaign's strategy of using informal engagements to reach voters has been consistent from when Biden was on the ticket, but the nature of the events has shifted along with the candidates. During a bus tour in western Pennsylvania, for example, they stopped at a football practice – Walz is a former assistant high school football coach.
Walz met Harris on the tarmac in Savannah, and the two greeted students from Savannah State University before setting off in their bright blue bus with "Harris Walz" emblazoned in big letters on the side, along with the phrase "A New Way Forward."
The Georgia trip is a makeup visit from earlier in the month, when the duo was set to embark on a seven-state swing tour introducing the new Democrat ticket. The North Carolina and Georgia legs of the trip got scrapped as Tropical Storm Debby battered the region.
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