5-day Iowa bus tour

Kamala Harris plans 5-day Iowa bus tour

By DAVID SIDERS

Kamala Harris is planning to ramp up her presidential campaign travel schedule and public appearances next month, starting with a five-day bus tour through Iowa.

The shift to a more intense retail operation follows Harris' rise in public opinion polls in the Democratic primary. She is attempting to capitalize on momentum following a breakout debate performance last month, in which she criticized former Vice President Joe Biden for his past opposition to busing and former associations with segregationist senators.

Harris had been slower than some of her competitors to develop a field operation in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state, and some of her rivals were far more active there earlier in the election cycle.

But Harris’ campaign had long said that it planned to embark on longer campaign swings and to do more public events by late summer and early fall. An adviser told POLITICO on Thursday that the campaign was consciously conserving staffing resources throughout the first few months of the campaign.

Harris now has more than 65 staffers in Iowa, and her campaign is attempting to capitalize on momentum from the first debate by intensifying its retail efforts now. The California senator is running at 13 percent in the latest Morning Consult poll. In Iowa, a Focus on Rural America poll this month put Harris at 18 percent in the first-in-the-nation caucus state — in a cluster with Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Harris’ bus tour across Iowa will start Aug. 8, after the second debates. It will run the breadth of the state, from Sioux City to Davenport, and will include stops in three of Iowa’s congressional districts.

Harris was greeted by large crowds in Iowa following the first debate, when she appeared there over the Fourth of July holiday. Her campaign views the bus tour as setting a marker for her intensifying efforts there.

Harris campaigned for Barack Obama in Iowa in 2008, and her Iowa campaign chairwoman, Deidre DeJear, was Iowa’s first black nominee for statewide office from a major political party when she ran for secretary of state last year.