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. Former President Barack Obama is also hitting the trail, beginning Thursday night in Pittsburgh.
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 is aware, people who have spoken to him say, that he may be dogged by Trump supporters along the way who bring up his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and his past scandals. He’s prepared for that and ready to argue that voters need to focus on the stakes in these final weeks.
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 economic 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.”
The drop off in rural voters has been a huge running concern for Democrats, even as urban populations have grown and tilted increasingly blue, with the Harris campaign tracking a step decline in Democratic support in rural counties between Clinton’s last time on the ballot in 1996 and Biden’s win four years ago.
In one moment that has haunted some Hillary Clinton aides, the former president once asked in an internal strategy meeting what they were doing to appeal to rural voters but was quickly shot down, with an adviser saying that those voters were gone for Democrats.
The Harris campaign’s rural strategy is more than Bill Clinton, though. The vice president and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have both appeared in rural areas in Georgia and Pennsylvania, with more rural visits in battlegrounds planned for both in the final weeks, paired with work being done out of offices the campaign has opened in rural counties.
Last week, the campaign launched a series of ads targeted at rural voters airing specifically on RFD-TV, Fox News Channel, INSP, History, The Cowboy Channel, The CowGirl Channel and Destination America.
James Carville, the former Clinton consultant who has long been pushing for his old boss’ return, said he was glad to see it finally happen.
“He’s the best explainer of things there is,” Carville told CNN, stressing that if the election is litigated along his famous “it’s the economy, stupid” lines, Clinton has the credibility to make the case.
Asked if he would have liked to see Clinton out sooner, Carville joked, “The best time to plant an oak tree was 25 years ago. The second best time is now.”
At a campaign stop outside of Pittsburgh on Thursday morning, Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio said he’d be eager to see Clinton campaign in his state. “We have a record of presidents having grown jobs, having grown the economy, and kicked the crap out of the economic record for when Republicans were in the White House.”
Asked if voters remember Clinton, Deluzio — who noted he recently turned 40 — said, “Some folks do,” adding that “a lot of voters younger than me don’t remember the 90s or weren’t even alive.”
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 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.
This story has been updated with additional information.
