Kamala Harris left for Detroit on Monday morning as part of a two-stop effort that will culminate with her holding her first campaign event with the man she replaced on the ticket: Joe Biden.
The vice president boarded Air Force One with headphones on and her phone in hand as she prepared for another campaign just nine weeks before Election Day.
She pressed the receiver and did not respond to the journalists who were waiting for her and shouting questions at her.
Harris and Biden will meet in Pittsburgh to rally union members in the critical battleground state.
The date and session for their first sighting together is significant: it will take place on Labor Day in a must-win state.
But their journey is overshadowed by the war in the Middle East.
Before leaving for her stop, Harris will join Biden on Monday in the Situation Room to meet with the U.S. hostage deal negotiating team to discuss efforts to free the remaining hostages.
Kamala Harris flew to Detroit on Monday morning, part of a two-day campaign that will end with her holding her first campaign event with the man she replaced on the ticket: Joe Biden.
Israel said Sunday morning it had recovered the bodies of six hostages, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The deaths prompted thousands of people to protest in the streets of Israel.
Harris has backed Biden’s efforts to arm Israel and reach a deal on hostage-taking and a ceasefire. She has also expressed concern about the treatment of civilians in Gaza.
Following the meeting at the White House, the duo will go on tour.
Both Michigan and Pennsylvania make up the Democrats’ “blue wall,” a series of Midwestern states that are seen as critical to retaining the White House. Biden won both states in the 2020 election, but Donald Trump won them in 2016.
They will be joined in Pittsburgh by Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Bob Casey, Lt. Gov. Austan Davis, Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, and Reps. Summer Lee, Madeleine Dean and Chris Deluzio.
The vice president boarded Air Force One with headphones and her phone in hand as she prepared for another tour just nine weeks before Election Day.
Harris waves to waiting reporters and photographers as she makes her way to the steps of Air Force Two.
Harris and her campaign have been cautious about deploying Biden. The president dropped out of the ticket in July when Democrats began to worry that he would lose to Trump and drag them down with him.
But he may still be an effective surrogate among older voters, white men and in Pennsylvania, the state where he was born and considers his second home.
The rest of the week will be spent on his own: on Thursday, the president will be in Wisconsin (another “blue wall” state) to promote his administration’s investment in that state’s communities. On Friday, he will go to Michigan to do the same.
Biden and Harris appeared together on Aug. 15 in Largo, Maryland, at an event promoting the administration’s work to lower prescription drug prices. But the visit was an official visit to the White House, not a campaign stop.
They were also together on stage after Biden spoke on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.
Labor Day is the traditional kickoff to the fall campaign season, when millions of voters begin tuning into the race.
Harris and her surrogates are on a massive Labor Day campaign trail: Her running mate, Tim Walz, and his wife, Gwen Walz, will be in Milwaukee, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will be in Newport News, Virginia.
With less than three months until the election, Harris’ campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, maintains that Harris and Walz are the “clear underdogs” in the race.
“Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than at any time since 2020,” he wrote in a campaign memo, adding that “the race will continue to be incredibly close, and it will take extraordinary work to win over the voters who will decide this election. But we have the candidate, the message, and the operation that unites Americans to chart a new path forward, so we can once again defeat Donald Trump.”
Both parties are worried about complacency: that their voters will simply stay home on Election Day.
Unions are a key element of Democratic coherence and can help turn out voters. Biden was the first sitting president to join a picket line, when he marched alongside striking autoworkers in Michigan.
Harris has the backing of the United Auto Workers union, which has a strong presence in Michigan, and the United Steelworkers union, which dominates western Pennsylvania, including Pittsburgh.
The biggest union backer Harris’s campaign lacks is the Teamsters, which has so far refrained from endorsing Harris or Trump.
Harris’ campaign notes that under the administration, support for union membership has grown to its highest level in half a century.
The administration also extended overtime pay protections for workers and helped create millions of union jobs through the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were last seen together on stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
The couple also appeared at an official event together in Maryland last month.
The Pittsburgh stop will be Harris’ ninth trip to Pennsylvania this year, while the Detroit visit will be her sixth to Michigan in 2024.
Harris’s stop in Detroit on Monday will focus on the part of the state that is one of the country’s main Democratic strongholds. She will address union members.
She will be joined by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Senator Debbie Stabenow, Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist, Representative Elissa Slotkin, Representative Debbie Dingell, AFT President Randi Weingarten, NEA President Becky Pringle and UAW International President Shawn Fain.
Turnout in the city is expected to exceed 50 percent of registered voters for the general election, the city clerk told the Associated Press.
Polls in Michigan and Pennsylvania show Harris and Trump tied.
The Trump campaign has not publicly announced any events for Labor Day weekend.
The former president will participate in a town hall on FOX on Wednesday hosted by Sean Hannity, and later this week he will address the Fraternal Order of Police at its fall meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, and hold a rally in Wisconsin.
