Harris Tours Georgia as Democrats See the State Fully in Play

“It requires a whole lot of rehearsal, a whole lot of practice, long hours, right?” said Ms. Harris, adding that she, too, had played in school bands. “Sometimes you hit the note, sometimes you don’t, right? But all that practice makes for beautiful music, and that is a metaphor — that is symbolic — for everything that you all will do in your life.”

The bus tour’s route takes the candidates through a part of the state not often visited by Democrats, underscoring the campaign’s efforts to motivate rural voters. That is true not just in Georgia, but also in nearby North Carolina, a demographically similar Sunbelt state.

Both states have significant populations of Black voters, including many who live in rural areas. Democrats have said that they must drive up turnout outside major cities and suburbs to defeat Mr. Trump statewide. Polls show Ms. Harris performing far better in North Carolina than Mr. Biden did, and her allies in the state have compared the energy of her campaign to Barack Obama’s in 2008, the last time a Democrat was victorious there.

Her swing through Georgia with Mr. Walz carries echoes of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, in which he and Al Gore, his running mate, traversed the Peach State’s rural towns with their wives, as Mr. Clinton leaned on his Southern bona fides. Mr. Clinton later won Georgia by less than one percentage point, making him the last Democrat to take the state before Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020.

Mr. Biden won Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes and lost North Carolina by under 75,000, his closest defeat in 2020. The two states, which had been leaning toward Mr. Trump before Ms. Harris’s rise, are now considered tossups. One of Mr. Trump’s clearest paths to victory would involve holding North Carolina and flipping Georgia and Pennsylvania, which, with 19 electoral votes, is the most valuable of the battleground states.