Vice President Kamala Harris will draw from some hometown talent on Wednesday when Bon Iver performs at a rally in Eau Claire, Wis. — part of a barnstorm tour of swing states she is doing with her running mate this week.
Bon Iver, the Grammy-award winning indie folk band, is led by singer-songwriter Justin Vernon, who comes from Eau Claire.
Harris is announcing her running mate in Philadelphia on Tuesday. She will then continue to a series of states that are key to her electoral strategy: Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.
Harris previously shared the stage with hip-hop artists Megan Thee Stallion and Quavo, who joined the vice president at her Atlanta campaign rally last month. Like Vernon, Quavo was in front of a hometown crowd — he grew up in nearby Gwinnett County, Ga.
The appearances — and the campaign’s ability to leverage a diverse set of celebrity talent, including Beyoncé — draw a sharp contrast to President Biden’s re-election effort, where he largely campaigned in smaller venues and struggled to generate the same enthusiasm that Harris or Donald Trump have on the campaign trail.
Vernon, best known in recent years for his frequentcollaborations with Taylor Swift, is not a newcomer to Democratic politics. He backed Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and performed at a Sanders rally ahead of the Iowa caucus.
He also launched a get-out-the-vote campaign called “For Wisconsin” and performed at six colleges across the state in the week leading up to the 2022 midterm elections. The tour’s slogan was “Apocolypse Nah.”
