Walz’s Pennsylvania Campaign Swing Underscores Challenges in the Battleground

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Thursday capped two days of crisscrossing Pennsylvania, talking up Vice President Kamala Harris’s experience, taking shots at former President Donald J. Trump and making his now familiar pleas to voters that they fight for freedom with optimism.

“Look, it would be easier if we didn’t have to do this. It would be easier if these guys wouldn’t undermine our system, if they wouldn’t lie about elections, if they wouldn’t put women’s health at risk. But they are, so it’s a privilege for us to do the fight,” he said in Erie, Pa., where he stumped from a stage at the edge of Presque Isle Bay before hundreds of cheering supporters waving “Coach” and “Kamala” signs.

The appearance was one of several events that Mr. Walz used to blitz the local media airwaves and fire up Democratic volunteers with the Midwestern dad charm that his party is banking on to help draw white working-class voters. Mr. Walz, and his daughter, Hope, hit several cities in counties that went for Mr. Trump in 2016 — stung by fading American manufacturing and a difficult economy.

The shooting this week at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., added urgency to his message at the Erie rally and at local Democratic offices, where he stressed it was in voters’ power to elect leaders willing to pass gun-safety laws, tackle climate change and ensure freedom in health decisions.

“I say it as a gun owner; I say it as a veteran; I say it as a hunter: none of the things we’re proposing infringes on your Second Amendment right. But what does infringe upon this is our children going to school and being killed,” he said at a Harris-Walz field office in Erie. “It is unacceptable, and it doesn’t have to be this way. So we end that with our votes. We end it with a vision of a better America.”

Onstage later, he recalled sitting with the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut when he was still a member of Congress and a cardholder of the National Rifle Association. “I think about it — today, my son, this week, started his senior year of high school,” Mr. Walz said. “And it’s bittersweet for me because those killed at Sandy Hook would have been entering their senior year, too.”