Former President Bill Clinton will hit the trail this weekend to begin what is expected to be a very targeted push across battleground states through Election Day, three sources familiar with his plans told CNN.
The former president will seek to appeal to rural voters, among whom polls have shown Vice President Kamala Harris is performing worse than some of the last few Democratic nominees, particularly among younger Black men.
Clinton will start with stops in Georgia on Sunday and Monday, with a bus tour next week in North Carolina expected to follow, pending recovery from the hurricanes.
The emphasis is on counties won by former President Donald Trump. But it’s also on Clinton voters, hoping there are enough left from when he was the last Democratic presidential nominee before Biden to win Georgia in 1992 and that he can reconnect them to a coalition they’ve been steadily dropping out of over the last decade.
Clinton won’t appear at rallies. Going back to a kind of campaigning that he hasn’t done since before he became the “Comeback Kid” in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, Clinton’s schedule is for local fairs and porch rallies, talking to at most a few hundred people at a time.
He will talk about the economy, convinced that this is the issue that the election will come down to for the voters on the fence. He will pick up themes from his Democratic National Convention speech this summer about how Trump is only out for Trump, and how he himself has been out of office for more than 20 years and is still younger than the Republican nominee. He will eat fried foods (maybe even briefly breaking the vegan diet he’s famously kept to since heart surgery).
“He’s the perfect messenger to make the case that Kamala Harris would fix inflation and finish getting the economy back on track,” one person who’s spoken with the former president about his plans told CNN on Thursday. “So he’s saddling up, returning to his roots and meeting people where they are to ask for their help electing her.”
Clinton was one of the first five calls Harris made in July after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, a person with knowledge of the conversation told CNN. She asked for his support and he immediately offered it, and their aides have been working out campaigning details ever since.
“He’s an authority on economics and bread and butter issues and the longest peacetime expansion in American history,” said Calvin Smyre, a former Georgia state representative who talked to CNN about his warm memories of watching Clinton campaign in the state in 1992. “He has a knack of reaching people.”
Jason Carter, a former Georgia state senator, said he believes Clinton will be a huge help in southern Georgia and beyond.
“People think of Bill Clinton’s time as the president as a time when this country was doing well, where people were making money, where people weren’t left behind,” Carter said.
But the importance, Carter said, isn’t just about nostalgia.
“It shows people even in Atlanta that this is a kind of campaign that is not trying to make distinctions between rural and urban,” Carter said, arguing that Clinton can help tell the story of working and middle class roots that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have themselves been stressing on the trail.
One Georgia voter, Carter confirmed, is already all in: his grandfather, former President Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 last week and said he’s waiting to vote for Harris from hospice care.
“We’re all waiting for the ballot to show up,” the younger Carter said.
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