Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz delivered motivational speeches to campaign volunteers and a high school football team on Sunday. Their bus tour of a corner of Pennsylvania served as a modest, small-town version of the major rally planned for this week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Vice President Harris and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, were accompanied by their spouses, Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, on the tour in a blue bus. They stopped to visit volunteers at a campaign office not far from Pittsburgh before continuing on to a fire station and a high school in another city. They also made a pilgrimage to a Sheetz supermarket, part of a famous Pennsylvania chain.

In all their appearances, Harris and her running mate avoided political statements and instead limited themselves to general messages about character, perseverance and the future of the country.

Harris spoke about strength and leadership to a crowd of supporters and volunteers outside the campaign office in Rochester County. She appeared to make a veiled reference to Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate known for his combative style and strongman image, when she said that “the true measure of a leader’s strength is in who you support,” not who you tear down.

“Anyone who puts others down is a coward,” she shouted, earning cheers and applause. “This is what strength looks like.”

Walz seemed to take on the role of his former job as a high school football coach in his remarks, telling the volunteers, “Let’s leave it all on the field. Let’s get this thing done.”

Rochester is located in Beaver County, which Trump won in 2020. But Democrats are riding a new wave of enthusiasm after President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for re-election exactly four weeks ago and endorsed Harris as his successor.

As Harris’ motorcade left town, she passed a group of about 50 Trump supporters waiting near the road, carrying signs in support of the former president. A handful of Harris supporters stood nearby with their own signs.

The vice president next stopped at a fire station in Aliquippa, where she met firefighters, petted the station’s dog and gave the crew almond cookies before heading to a nearby high school, where she met the local football coach and spoke to the team, who knelt on the field to listen.

Walz slipped back into coaching mode and reminisced a bit about his time as a team leader and the nature of the sport before introducing Harris. She praised the young athletes for their leadership qualities: “Our nation is counting on you and your excellence. We applaud your ambition.”

She also told them: “Welcome to the role model club.”

Southwest Pennsylvania is a key part of a crucial swing state that has long drawn the attention of presidential candidates. The state voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Both Harris and Trump are vying to see who can put Pennsylvania in their column on November 5.

Most polls, including those from the New York Times/Siena College and Fox News, predict that Harris and Trump will be neck and neck nationwide.

Trump held a rally in Wilkes-Barre in the northeast of the state on Saturday, after attending rallies in Harrisburg and Butler in July, where he survived an assassination attempt.

The bus trip is Harris’ eighth trip to Pennsylvania this year and her second this month. The vice president chose to make her first joint appearance with Walz on the ballot on August 6 in Philadelphia.

On Sunday, they arrived at Pittsburgh International Airport with their spouses and greeted their supporters. The quartet held hands and raised their arms in unison in front of cheering supporters. They then boarded a bright blue bus, with “Harris Walz” written on it in large white letters, and set off to stop and shake hands with voters in the Pittsburgh area.

During a stop in the community of Moon, Harris stopped by Sheetz to look for Doritos, her favorite snack.

In Rochester, Harris, Walz and their spouses spent a few minutes sitting at tables with volunteers and making phone calls to organize support.

Harris picked up a volunteer’s cell phone and spoke to the person on the other end.

“I love Erie. We’ll come to Erie someday,” Harris said.

She continued the conversation and at some point said, “79 days left.”

Walz, who was sitting across the table from Harris, hung up, said of the caller: “He’s totally into it” and gave a thumbs up.

Kristin Kanthak, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, said Pennsylvania is “a state that has traditionally played a hugely important role, but southwestern Pennsylvania is kind of the swing state within the swing state.”

After Trump’s surprise victory in Pennsylvania in 2016, Biden was able to turn Pennsylvania on its head in 2020 – and thus win the White House. This was achieved, among other things, by increasing his vote totals in heavily Democratic Pittsburgh, the state’s second-largest city and the county seat of Allegheny County.

Biden eagerly courted the region’s workers’ unions, opening his 2020 presidential campaign in a Teamsters hall in Pittsburgh with the declaration: “I am a union man.”

Trump, who is counting on high turnout from his white, working-class electorate, is not giving up on the region. The districts around Pittsburgh switched from Democrats to Republicans in the last presidential election and served Trump well in his two previous attempts.

Trump has also embraced protectionist trade policies and said he is pro-worker. His promise to increase U.S. energy production and to say “drill, baby, drill” has resonated in working-class districts in southwestern Pennsylvania like Washington, where a boom in natural gas production has helped make Pennsylvania the country’s second-largest producer after Texas. Harris once wanted to ban fracking, a process used to extract oil and gas, before recently backing away from her previous position – a reversal for which Trump has sharply criticized her.

Dana Brown, director of Chatham University’s Pennsylvania Center for Women & Politics, said in an interview that Harris would use the bus trip to boost local media coverage and reach voters in the southwest part of the state “while she still has great momentum.”

Bus tours have become a staple of political campaigns, in part because they generate free media exposure. During such trips, candidates slip out of their suit pants and leave Washington to travel around the country, meeting voters face-to-face in small venues like restaurants and corner shops.

The rather unremarkable scenes of Harris’ campaign on Sunday will be replaced by their exact opposite on Monday, when the Democratic National Convention begins and a prime-time Democratic parade will be presented, choreographed by director Steven Spielberg.