At campaign stops in southeastern Georgia and New Hampshire, the Democratic candidate tried to win voters in counties outside her party’s strongholds.

On a hot Thursday afternoon in late August, a downpour hit Savannah, Georgia, just as several thousand people were lining up to get into a campaign rally for Kamala Harris. Inside the Enmarket Arena, “Love Train,” by the O’Jays, was playing, as some attendees in the security line forfeited their large umbrellas to the Secret Service, and others headed to the bathroom to wring out sodden clothes. A few rally-goers took advantage of a balcony space to set out their shoes and socks to dry, standing in barefoot conversation along the arena’s railings as the clouds parted and the brutal afternoon sunshine returned. At the Democratic National Convention, a little more than a week earlier, Georgia had proved itself to have one of the most boisterous delegations during a surprise performance by the rapper Lil Jon in the middle of the roll call. Now, despite a wait of several hours, the energy had not abated: on the floor, a group did the Electric Slide to the nineteen-eighties club hit “Set It Off”; in the bleachers, older attendees boogied to disco classics, fanning themselves with black-and-white Harris-Walz fans. The meme-to-merch pipeline was in overdrive: there were “My Black Job Is Voting” T-shirts, “Say It to My Face” shirts, and a shirt that said “Peaches 🖤 Coconuts.” I asked a woman wearing a black tee hemmed with fringe and printed with Michelle Obama’s Democratic Convention exhortation to “Do Something!” how it had made its way to her apparel so quickly. “My niece made it for me!” she said.

According to her campaign, Harris’s appearance that day—part of a two-day bus tour in southeastern Georgia, where most counties have a history of voting Republican—would mark the first time a Presidential candidate running in the general election had visited Savannah since Bill Clinton’s bus tour of southern Georgia, in the early nineteen-nineties. “Democrats in Georgia are finally learning an important lesson . . . there is more to Georgia than just Atlanta,” a statement from the Trump campaign on Harris’s visit read.

Electoral projections show that the swing states of Georgia and Pennsylvania are crucial to winning the election. Harris’s campaign has therefore been explicit that visits to places such as south Georgia and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, are attempts to turn out voters outside the Party’s strongholds in cities and suburbs. “In the battlegrounds, we are working to persuade moderate and Republican voters, and cut Trump’s margins in rural areas and red counties,” a recent e-mail from Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign co-chair, said. (As Joe Biden’s running mate, Harris had already stopped in Savannah as part of a “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour earlier in the year.) In so doing, the campaign has attempted to redefine what a Democrat who lives in a predominantly Republican area might be drawn to—this is not Clinton’s “Bubbas for Bill” tour, as his bus campaign was nicknamed, inspired by a phrase seen painted on the side of a barn, but, rather, an effort that seemed tailored to impress the rural-adjacent Southern voter who likes a farm-to-table heirloom-tomato salad. In Savannah, Harris attended a volunteer-appreciation event at the Grey, a contemporary Southern restaurant with regionally sourced food in a renovated former Greyhound terminal, and stopped by for a slice of chocolate caramel cake at Dottie’s Market, a café “for the nostalgia seeker and the story lover,” as its Web site puts it. What had been called a “barnstorm” through southeast Georgia seemed to be, with the exception of a visit to a high-school band practice in the small city of Hinesville, largely a tour of Savannah-area eateries.

The morning of the Savannah rally, people wearing Harris-themed tees could be spotted around the city’s historic downtown. “A lot of people are very excited to know that she is here,” Kevin Cook, who was wearing a shirt with an illustrated portrait of Harris on it, told me that morning outside the First Bryan Baptist Church. Cook, who is the music minister at the church, a Black congregation founded in 1788, said he wasn’t planning on attending—all the standing around is a physical challenge for him—but that he anticipated a big turnout. “I expect it to be a glorious event,” he said. “You’re going to see a lot of people that we haven’t seen in years.”

In 2020, when Biden became the first Democratic Presidential candidate to flip Georgia in twenty-eight years, he won two counties in the southeastern part of the state: Chatham County, in which Savannah is situated, and nearby Liberty County, home to Hinesville and Fort Stewart, a large Army base. Both counties lean Democratic, have significant populations of Black voters, and are partially rural. At the rally, I spoke with Micah Smith, a retired Army veteran and L.G.B.T.Q. activist from Hinesville who ran to be a representative in the Georgia State House in the 2022 Democratic primary. (She lost to the incumbent.) Smith, who is trans, stood in the front row draped in a pride flag and expressed confidence that Harris would do more for women’s rights and reproductive rights than Biden had. “This is the first time since I started voting, in 1998, that I’m voting for the best candidate for the office and not the lesser of two evils,” she said. “I really appreciate her promise to fight limits on bodily autonomy and her standing against Trump and his promise to turn off gender-affirming care for veterans.”

One couple, who had driven to the rally from South Carolina, showed me a photograph of a tournament bracket they had drawn on a paper towel during the primary debates for the 2020 election, which predicted that Harris would take the Democratic nomination. “When Biden said that he was stepping down and supporting Harris, it was, like, ‘Oh, my God. This is like a prediction coming true,’ ” Catherine Forester, of Beaufort, told me. “I kept the napkin in a drawer,” her partner, Kevin Prentice, said.

“Warnock won the state twice,” Katherine Simmons, a stay-at-home mother of three in Savannah, told me, referring to Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Atlanta who won a special election in 2021 and a full term in 2022. She mentioned an increase in the construction of warehouses along the Georgia seacoast, and the resulting controversy over development. “Rural counties are going through a lot of changes with our government selling out their way of life to big warehouses and foreign companies,” she said. “I think people are just picking their heads up out of the sand and asking, Who are the people that are going to represent us?”

Harris was introduced by Katelyn Green, the president of the Student Government Association of Savannah State University, a historically Black school. Harris did not speak of warehouses along the Georgia coast, or of any particularly local issues. Her speech—in which she thanked Georgians for delivering the state for Biden in 2020 and urged attendees not to pay attention to the polls “because we are running as the underdogs”—was disrupted twice by individuals protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The first of these provoked not boos exactly but a kind of generalized clamor that temporarily drowned out Harris’s words. “I am speaking now, but, on the subject, I will say this,” she said, as the protester was led away. “The President and I are working around the clock. We have got to get a hostage deal done and get a ceasefire done now.”

A few days later, after a Labor Day rally with union members in Detroit, Harris was back in another semi-rural area, this time for a rally in North Hampton, a small town outside of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Like Georgia, New Hampshire’s statewide elected officials are a mix of Republicans (the governor) and Democrats (senators), and both houses of its state legislature have Republican majorities. Unlike in Georgia, a Republican Presidential candidate has not won the state since 2000. Over the weekend, the Boston Globe had reported that a top Trump-campaign volunteer from Massachusetts had been let go after sending out an e-mail declaring that “the campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state.” Trump-campaign officials denied that he had given up on the state, which he has not visited since January.

The Harris rally, where she planned to announce a series of policy proposals to support small businesses, was being held at Throwback Brewery, a woman-owned restaurant and beer-maker on a twelve-acre farm with chickens, goats, and a hop yard. A gleaming white repurposed barn was decorated with red, white, and blue bunting and covered in solar panels. The campaign staff member checking in the press wore a T-shirt with a photograph of Tim Walz cradling a small pig.

As for the local population demographics, the crowd at the rally was older and more white than the one in Georgia had been, and many attendees looked as if they were dressed for a hike. The mood was positive but more subdued, perhaps because people in New Hampshire are used to being campaigned to. The rally was being held outside, and attendees waited under the midday sun, drinking free lemonade or iced tea or one of the beers being sold out of a truck. In a state whose motto is “Live Free or Die,” nearly everyone I spoke with said that their primary concern was reproductive rights. “I have a friend who just had a miscarriage, but she couldn’t get care. She’s in Texas right now, and I think that’s a really scary issue,” an attendee named Becca Oney told me. She said she has at times leaned to the right politically, particularly on the issue of gun rights, in part because of her upbringing in rural Ohio. “We could take our guns to school,” she said. “Everybody got the first day of hunting season off if you wanted.”

Cell-phone coverage at the rally was almost nonexistent, and so there was a collective gasp of shock from the audience when Harris, after being introduced by Nicole Carrier, the brewery’s co-owner, spoke of the news of the shooting that had happened that morning at a school in Winder, Georgia. “Our kids are sitting in a classroom where they should be fulfilling their God-given potential, and some part of their big, beautiful brain is concerned about a shooter busting through the door of the classroom,” Harris said, from behind bulletproof glass surrounding the speaker podium. “It does not have to be this way.”

After a few minutes, she turned to her policy speech, laying out a series of goals: hitting twenty-five million new small-business applications by the end of her first term; expanding the tax deduction for startups from five thousand dollars to fifty thousand dollars; and increasing access to low- and no-interest loans, among other programs. “We will support innovation hubs and business incubators,” she said. “And we will have a particular focus on small businesses in rural communities, like right here in New Hampshire.”

After years of neglecting the rural vote, the Democratic Party wants to win some of it back. On Friday, Politico reported that the Harris campaign had hired Matt Hildreth, a progressive organizer, as a “rural engagement director,” a sign that the campaign is trying to articulate a vision for rural America beyond stale promises of broadband Internet. They are also trying to stem the perception of a rift. “We don’t have to pit urban and rural against each other,” Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of the Harris campaign, said, on MSNBC, after the Savannah rally. But what the Party promises in rural areas—improved access to health care, higher education, and investment—might not be specific enough to convince voters. Will showing up to say hello and eat chocolate caramel cake make up for it? In New Hampshire, a state where I saw the opening words of the Constitution emblazoned on the fender of a pickup truck, Harris fell back on old-fashioned patriotic appeal. “When it comes down to it, we are all here together because we love our country,” she said. “We love our country, and we know the privilege—the privilege and pride that comes with being an American.”

The crowd responded, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

“That’s right!” Harris said, nodding.