BUSSIN’

Kamala Harris has a novel plan to win Georgia: Take the fight deep into Trump country.

• Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), kicked off a Peach State bus tour on Wednesday by heading into the kind of ruby red counties that Democrats typically avoid. The rationale? To push beyond the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta, and drive turnout in rural areas that will cut Trump’s margin of victory beyond the cities. President Biden narrowly won this battleground state in 2020 — by only 12,000 of 5 million total votes — and you can’t count on being lucky twice.  Harris plans to end the trip on Thursday with a rally in Savannah, where she’s also taping an interview with CNN to be released that night.

• “These are the types of places where you might not be able to go from losing 90-10 to winning them, but you can absolutely stave off” a larger loss, Quentin Fulks, one of Harris’s top aides, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Even a top adviser to right-wing Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) admitted that the strategy is “smart” … before accusing the Biden administration of being stupid on other things.

• It’s not just Georgia. Harris’s team also plans to ramp up similar margin-focused strategies in other swing states, Politico reports. In North Carolina, Harris will try to channel former President Barack Obama, who boosted Black voter turnout and minimized white rural defections in 2008, securing the state’s 16 electoral votes. She will do the same in Pennsylvania, where liberal stars Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) outperformed national Dems in rural counties.

Disgraced former President Donald Trump is having… a tougher week on the campaign trail.

• Trump campaign staffers verbally and physically sparred with an official at the Arlington National Cemetery on Monday — because they were salty they weren’t allowed to snap as many pics as they wanted of their boss mooning over the graves of fallen American soldiers. Nothing says “patriotism” like causing a scene at a veterans’ cemetery! Team Trump claims their photographer was given permission to be there.

• Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, meanwhile, were the unfortunate recipients of campaign stops by the notoriously awkward GOP veep nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) on Wednesday. Vance has distinguished himself on the campaign trail with a series of embarrassing appearances featuring popular snack food items, for reasons that defy easy explanation. First, there were multiple strange remarks about Diet Mountain Dew. Now, even Vance is expressing regret for his painfully cringey viral moment at a donut shop, during which the woman behind the counter asked not to be on camera. “I’m JD Vance, and I’m running for vice president,” he exclaimed. “Ok,” she deadpanned. Vance later declared himself sorry. “I just felt terrible for that woman,” Vance said. But it’s not like that’s going to stop him from mortifying service workers in the future for his own political gain.

Public service announcement to anyone working in a convenience store in the Midwest: Watch out, JD Vance is coming for you, too.

NEWS NEWS NEWS

The gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump also looked up President Joe Biden’s events, but chose the Pennsylvania campaign rally because it was a “target of opportunity,” the FBI said Wednesday.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov was charged in France on Wednesday with an array of crimes related to alleged illegal activity on the messaging platform, and barred from leaving the country. Top tech bros aren’t often held personally responsible for happenings on their apps, and the arrest is fueling a debate over the line between free speech and illegal activity, which has always been blurry on encrypted servers.

Noted roadkill enthusiast and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. trashed Trump at least a dozen times before endorsing him, calling Trump a “terrible president” and “absurd and terrifying,” according to a new tally by the New York Times. Amazing that he found time to form such trenchant political opinions, between bouts of chainsawing whale heads  and leaving dead bears in Central Park.

JD Vance’s new press secretary reportedly once worked for a political consultancy with ties to far-right extremist groups. Who would have guessed the guy could be linked to a “secretive invitation-and-men-only fraternal lodge” with a creepy name like the Society for American Civil Renewal. Not us! Quelle surprise!

President Biden approved the deployment of a controversial military aid pier off the Gaza coast despite pushback from within the government, a watchdog report out Tuesday night found. The pier faced repeated criticism, with many lawmakers and activists saying that it didn’t address the core issue of Israel blocking aid from entering Gaza, before being pulled