On the campaign trail: Harris embarks on key battleground bus tour

US Vice President Kamala Harris embarks on a bus tour of the swing state of Georgia Wednesday, returning to the campaign trail after the Democratic convention for the final 10-week sprint against Donald Trump.

Riding on the momentum from her star turn in Chicago last week, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz are hitting a battleground that they believe is in play since she replaced Joe Biden as the party's nominee.

With Republican former president Trump also stepping up his campaign in the handful of toss-up states where the race for the White House will be decided, the November 5 presidential election promises to be agonizingly tight.

But after Biden flipped Georgia in 2020 for the first time in three decades, "we're seizing on the energy and putting in the work to win again in 2024," Harris's campaign said.

The Harris campaign also launched a huge television ad campaign Wednesday with a gravel-voiced narrator warning that Trump is "back, and he's out for control" with a radically conservative manifesto.

On their bus tour Wednesday, Harris and Walz are set to reach out to largely Black and working-class voters to shore up support in rural southern Georgia.

Then on Thursday, Harris will sit for her first interview since starting her campaign -- in a joint appearance with Walz on CNN -- before holding a solo rally in Savannah, Georgia.

The 59-year-old vice president has reinvigorated the Democratic Party in the frenetic five weeks since Biden, 81, dropped out of the race due to concerns about his age.

But while she has edged ahead of Trump in the polls, Harris insists that she is still the underdog.

Her visit to Georgia, which Biden won by a razor-thin margin of less than 12,000 votes in 2020, reflects how her campaign is determined to keep every pathway to victory open.

In the last days of Biden's campaign, increasingly poor polls showed his only real remaining hope of victory was through winning the three "Rust Belt" states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Harris is now also targeting the four "Sun Belt" states of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina as a way to give her multiple ways to win the overall Electoral College vote.

 'Human shield'  

Trump -- who faces criminal charges in Georgia related to his alleged plot to overturn the 2020 election -- is also stepping up his swing state campaign.

He will be attacking Harris's "dangerously liberal policies" in Michigan and Wisconsin on Thursday, before traveling to Pennsylvania on Friday, his campaign said.

But his campaign was embroiled in controversy Wednesday after a report that his entourage shoved and verbally abused staff during a politicized visit to the United States' most hallowed resting place for its war dead.

National Public Radio reported that the incident happened when an Arlington National Cemetery official tried to prevent Trump's aides from taking images in a section for those killed in recent wars, where filming and staging of political events is banned.

Trump, 78, is trying to get back into gear after being wrong-footed by the sudden Democratic switch from Biden to Harris, who is not only two decades younger and of Black and South Asian heritage, but vying to be the first female US president.

His campaign has spent much time bashing Harris for not giving interviews since she launched her campaign.

Trump aide Jason Miller criticized her for only agreeing to a joint interview with CNN, accusing her of using Walz as a "human shield."

The two sides are also clashing over their first debate, scheduled for less than two weeks' time on September 10.

Trump said Tuesday he had "reached an agreement" for the debate following a dispute over whether the candidates' microphones would be muted when the other was speaking, but Harris's campaign did not confirm a deal.

Neither candidate will forget that it was 81-year-old Biden's disastrous performance against Trump in a debate on June 27 that ended up forcing him out of the race.