Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and their spouses began a one-day western Pennsylvania bus tour at Pittsburgh International Airport on Sunday. The visit marked the campaign’s first visit to the region.
When Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff stepped out of Air Force Two in the early afternoon, they were greeted with cheers and applause from a crowd of hundreds of supporters in an airport hangar. Harris and Walz shook hands and spoke with supporters in attendance, who chanted “We’re not going back” while the pair boarded their bus.
Sen. Bob Casey, Rep. Summer Lee and Rep. Chris Deluzio, all of whom face reelection this fall, met the Vice President as she exited off the plane. Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato and Steelers Hall of Fame running back Jerome Bettis, nicknamed “The Bus,” greeted Harris and Walz as well.
Among those in attendance were roughly 50 members from the Service Employees International Union local 32BJ. Pete Schmidt, the union’s western Pennsylvania area leader, attended the event and said the reasons 32BJ supports Harris and Walz are “too numerous to count.”
“As a labor organization that represents about 7,000 members here in southwestern Pennsylvania, including about 1,000 members at the University of Pittsburgh, we believe that Vice President Harris and Tim Walz are the candidates that are going to continue to fight and protect everything that unions have worked for.” Schmidt said. “The guy that’s running again on the Republican side has proven time and time again that he is not pro-union. He is not for the working people, regardless of what his rhetoric is.”
Schmidt added that the SEIU represents Pitt workers in facilities, housing, groundskeeping, moving, receiving and medical building cleaning. With their contract expiring at the end of this year, Schmidt said electing Harris will help with getting “good contracts.”
The bus tour fell one day before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Democrats will unveil their party platform. Susan Shaiman Kimelman, a Pitt faculty emerita, and her husband Mikael Kimelman, a retired faculty member from Duquesne University, attended the event and said they’re “really happy with the policies that [Harris] has been involved in,” including her campaign’s positions on reproductive health care, the economy and education.
“I really feel like she’s considering all of America, not just a tiny little portion,” Susan Shaiman Kimelman said. “I’m really excited because I think, while there are a lot of people that are supporting Harris and Walz, I feel like she needs to get out into the areas outside of Pittsburgh as well and get people excited.”
Melissa Freel, a nonprofit administrator, attended the event and cited “reproductive rights, … protecting the environment, protecting the middle class [and] protecting education” as reasons why she will vote for the Harris-Walz ticket in November. She said the prospect of Project 2025’s plan to “dismantle the Department of Education” is “terrifying.”
“I have a son who receives special education services and it’s because of federal laws that he gets his free and appropriate education,” Freel said. “[Trump is] really the head of a larger machine that we have to really work against in terms of wanting to protect democracy and protect our individual rights and freedoms … I know Harris and Walz are going to fight against that machine.”
Edward Freel, Melissa Freel’s father and a retired software engineer for IBM, attended the event with his daughter and said he was a Republican until 2016. Freel said he “like[s] the fun that Kamala brings.”
“Listening to the negative stuff that’s coming out of the other side is so discouraging,” Freel said. “It’s nice to come out and hear a candidate who wants to bring joy back into the process of running for the most important job in the world.”
Freel added that although he believes the policy positions of the Harris-Walz campaign so far are ambitious, he said “she’s going in the right direction.”
“If we don’t have a House of Representatives and a Senate to support her, it’s going to be tough to get all those policies through,” Freel said. “I think she’s sending a message to the rest of the country that she’s going to give it her best go.”