WATCH: Harris and Walz speak to students in Hinesville during a stop on the Georgia bus tour

HINESVILLE, Ga. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, stopped by a high school band rehearsal Wednesday. They were part of a two-day bus tour of rural Georgia, campaigning for the crucial swing state while also delighting students who performed their school song for the Democratic ticket.

Watch Walz and Harris’ remarks in the player above.

“We are so proud of you and we are counting on you,” Harris told the young crowd, who screamed with excitement at the sight of the vice president. “Your generation … will lead our country into the next era of what we can do and be.”

The trip ends on Thursday with a rally in Savannah. Campaign officials are convinced that they need to gain a foothold in Republican strongholds to win the state for Republican Donald Trump in November. To do this, they need more than Atlanta and the suburbs that promised to Joe Biden in 2020.

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Michael Tyler, communications director for Harris’ campaign, said bus trips provide an “opportunity to get to places we don’t normally go (and) make sure we’re competing in all communities.”

The campaign’s goal is to use the events to galvanize voters in Republican-leaning areas who traditionally don’t see the candidates. It also hopes that the events will create viral moments that will gain mass media coverage and reach voters across the country.

In southeast Georgia, Democrats also stopped at businesses and campaign offices to thank volunteers.

The stops are intended as an opportunity to give voters the chance to “learn not only what they stand for, but who they are as people,” Tyler said.

Tyler said the campaign’s strategy of reaching out to voters through informal contacts has remained the same since President Biden took office, but the nature of the events has changed with the candidates. During a bus tour of Western Pennsylvania, for example, they stopped at a football practice – Walz is a former high school football assistant coach.

Walz met Harris on the tarmac in Savannah, and the two greeted Savannah State University students before driving off in their bright blue bus with red and white accents. “Harris Walz” was emblazoned in large letters on the side, along with the phrase “A new way forward.”

It looks like a regular campaign bus, but it is an armored US Secret Service vehicle driven by agents and equipped with flashing lights, sirens and secure communications. After the first stop, Harris got back into her traditional SUV and the bus was relegated to the back of the motorcade.

In addition to the bus tour and rally on Thursday, Harris and Walz will sit down with CNN anchor Dana Bash for their first joint interview. The interview will air Thursday evening.

The trip to Georgia is a make-up visit for earlier this month, when the duo was scheduled to unveil the new Democratic slate on a seven-state swing tour. The North Carolina and Georgia portions of the trip were canceled when Tropical Storm Debby devastated the region.

The Democrats’ strategy of poaching votes in Republican parts of the state has been somewhat successful before. Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first black senator, won re-election in 2022 by nearly 3 percentage points — while Joe Biden won Georgia by just a quarter of a percentage point about two years earlier — in part by venturing into the most Republican areas, pushed in part by activists who are now on Harris’ campaign team.

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Harris is conducting another blitz campaigning with President Biden in Detroit and Pittsburgh on Labor Day, even though the election is just over 70 days away. The first mail-in ballots will be sent to voters in just two weeks.

In Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp appears to have moved on from Trump’s fierce attacks against him at a rally in the state a few weeks ago, saying it was a “minor distraction that is a thing of the past.”

On the eve of Harris’ visit, Kemp told Fox News: “I’m not sure exactly what happened before the rally. I’ve heard a lot of different stories and explanations from people about what happened.”

At the rally, Trump attacked the governor, blaming him for his narrow 2020 loss in the state. In a roughly 10-minute tirade, Trump railed against Kemp for not pandering to his false theories about election fraud. He also blamed the governor for failing to stop a local district attorney from prosecuting him and others for their efforts to overturn the results in the state.

Last week, Trump changed his mind, thanking the governor in a social media post for all his “help and support in Georgia, where a win is so important to the success of our party and, most importantly, our country.”

Kemp said on Fox that Republicans “need to tell people why they should vote for us, what we’re going to do to make things better than they are now. And there are a number of issues where I think you could compare Kamala Harris and her record.”

“In my opinion, we need to focus on that and not on some argument from two or three weeks ago.”

Meanwhile, Harris’ campaign team has launched a new commercial in the swing states that aims to link Trump with the conservative “Project 2025.”

The first ad claims Trump wants to “control voters,” juxtaposing Trump quotes with ominous screenshots of the plan. The ad is part of Harris’ $370 million digital and TV ad booking between Labor Day and Election Day.

Led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a detailed, 920-page manual for governing under the next Republican administration that calls for, among other things, firing thousands of civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists and revoking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of abortion drugs.

Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, even though it was designed by longtime allies and former Trump administration officials. Last month, he posted on social media that he had not seen the plan, had “no idea who is responsible for it, and, unlike our very well-received Republican platform, had nothing to do with it.”