By Darlene Superville, Joey Cappelletti and Meg Kinnard, AP

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris declared herself and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “joyful warriors” against Donald Trump on Aug. 7 as they spent their first full day campaigning together across the Midwest. They got an unusual glimpse of how hotly contested the region will be when they overlapped on a Wisconsin tarmac with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance.

The Democrats visited Wisconsin and Michigan, hoping to shore up support among the younger, diverse, labor-friendly voters who were instrumental in helping President Joe Biden win the 2020 election.

Harris told the day’s first rally in Eau Claire, “As Tim Walz likes to point out, we are joyful warriors.” Contributing to that feeling, the Harris campaign said it had raised $36 million in the first 24 hours after she announced Walz as her running mate.

Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat seeking a third term, appeared with Harris at a campaign stop in suburban Milwaukee in July, and said in a fundraising email on the morning of Aug. 7 that she was “thrilled to see a fellow Midwesterner at the top of the ticket.”

The vice president said the pair look on the future with optimism, unlike former President Donald Trump whom she accused of being stuck in the past and preferring a confrontational style of politics — even as she criticized her opponent herself.

“Someone who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States should never again have the chance to sit behind the seal of the United States,” Harris said, her voice rising.

Donald Trump, too, has put emphasis on appealing to voters in Midwestern states with his choice of Vance, an Ohio Republican senator, his vice presidential pick. Vance was even bracketing the Harris-Walz ticket with Michigan and Wisconsin appearances of his own on Aug. 7.

The Republican started his day in Shelby Township, Michigan, and then headed to Eau Claire, the same city where the Democratic candidates appeared at a rally with the indie folk band Bon Iver.

The dueling schedules overlapped enough that while Harris was still greeting a group of Girl Scouts who came to see her arrive at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport in Wisconsin, Vance’s campaign plane landed nearby and was taxiing in the distance.

Harris posed for a group picture with the girls around the same time Vance was deplaning, and he began walking over to Air Force Two, trailed by his security detail.

The vice president eventually climbed into her motorcade, and it pulled away before they could interact. Still, that the pair came so close to doing so on a tarmac was unusual given the carefully scripted nature of campaign schedules.

“I just wanted to check out my future plane,” Vance later told reporters, meaning that he’d travel on Air Force Two should he and Trump be elected in November. He also criticized Harris for not taking questions from reporters, though she sometimes answers shouted questions while boarding or leaving her plane for campaign stops.

Vance later told the crowd at his Eau Claire event, “We actually just saw the vice president’s plane” and then joked of reporters traveling with him, “I figured they must be lonely because Kamala Harris doesn’t take any questions.”

“If those people want to call me weird I call it a badge of honor,” Vance said, responding to a moniker Walz used to describe him that made the Minnesota governor notable online in the days before Harris tapped him as her running mate.

At his early stop in Michigan, Vance appeared to blame Harris for illegal immigration that he says is leading to more crime. It was an attempt to hit Harris on an issue that motivates Republican-leaning voters as well as a pushback against Walz, who in his Aug. 6 speech in Philadelphia stressed that violent crime had been higher during Trump’s presidency.

“We’ve got to throw Kamala Harris out of office, not give her a promotion,” Vance said, arguing that the former prosecutor was not on the side of police.

Addressing the Democrats’ Wisconsin rally ahead of Harris, Walz had some critical words for Vance but trained most of his sharpest words on Trump, saying the former president “mocks our laws, he sows chaos and division amongst the people and that’s to say nothing of the job he did as president.”

Republicans are trying to portray Harris and Walz as too liberal for the Midwest, with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., saying on a conference call that Walz is “part of the radical, crazy left as is Vice President Harris.”

But Democratic enthusiasm has surged since Harris announced her candidacy and picked Walz as her running mate.

Dan Miller, from Pelican Lake, Wisconsin, who was among 12,000-plus Eau Claire rally attendees, said Biden “has been an incredible president, but he just isn’t the same messenger.”

“And sometimes you need a better messenger,” Miller said. “And that’s Kamala.”

Joey Cappelletti reported from Michigan. Associated Press writers Mark Vancleave in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, and Will Weissert in Washington contributed to this report.