Vice President Kamala Harris directed her team this week to immediately schedule a visit to Georgia following a media report that revealed two deaths linked to the battleground state’s abortion restrictions, according to two sources familiar with the planning – a callback to the rapid response travel she’s done over the past year.
“She made it clear that it needed to happen this week,” one source told CNN.
It’s reminiscent of the type of quickly arranged travel that placed Harris at the center of President Joe Biden’s then-reelection effort and an example of the types of moments her campaign is seizing on to elevate – and amplify – issues it believes will galvanize voters and mobilize them to vote.
“She uses her platform to command the attention of the country to these issues. This is a natural succession of that,” a senior Harris adviser told CNN.
Before she replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, Harris had traveled the country to offer forceful pushback over contentious Republican-led state legislation or laws on a range of issues.
Last year, for example, she delivered an impassioned speech in Nashville after Tennessee Republicans expelled two Black Democratic state legislators, who had protested on the state House floor against inaction on gun control following a mass shooting in the city.
That was later followed by a trip to Florida, where she slammed Republicans over a new set of standards for how Black history should be taught in the state’s public schools.
And earlier this year, she went to Arizona, where she coined the term “Trump abortion bans” in reference to the restrictions on the procedure implemented in Republican-led states since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Harris’ advisers see Friday’s trip to Georgia as emblematic of that approach: rushing to the scene of issues of consequence and using her bully pulpit to put a spotlight on it; and doing so in a state that Democrats are trying to keep in play.
