With a month to go until Election Day, former President Barack Obama will hit the campaign trail for Vice President Kamala Harris next week in Pennsylvania — part of a push to reach key voters in battleground states in the final stretch of the presidential race.
Obama, who remains , will appear at an event in Pittsburgh on Thursday, the beginning of what will reportedly be a blitz through swing states in the lead-up to Election Day.
“President Obama believes the stakes of this election could not be more consequential,” Eric Schultz, a senior adviser to Obama, . “And that is why he is doing everything he can to help elect Vice President Harris, Governor Walz and Democrats across the country.”
Obama and Harris have known each other for decades. They first met in 2004 when Obama was running for Senate and Harris was a district attorney in San Francisco. As , Harris “was among Barack Obama’s earliest supporters in 2008, knocking on doors and raising money to help propel him to a two-term presidency.” In 2015, Obama when Eric Holder left the Justice Department. (Obama eventually chose Loretta Lynch as Holder’s successor.) And Obama, the nation’s first Black president, is determined to help Harris make history as the first woman in the Oval Office.
Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama were among the first prominent Democrats to endorse Harris after President Biden dropped his reelection bid in July.
In August, they both delivered rousing speeches in support of her at the Democratic National Convention.
“Kamala Harris is more than ready for this moment,” Michelle Obama said in her convention speech, imploring Democrats to “do something” to help her win.
“If we work like we’ve never worked before, if we hold firm to our convictions — we will elect Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States,” Barack Obama . “We’ll elect leaders up and down the ballot who will fight for the hopeful, forward-looking America we all believe in.”
He also took a swipe at former President Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” a line that the Harris campaign has featured in its ads.
Obama’s appearance on the campaign trail wasn’t unexpected. He stumped for both Hillary Clinton and Biden in the days leading up to the 2016 and 2020 elections. that both the Obamas and Clintons would be traveling the country in the coming weeks.
And Obama headlined a fundraiser in Los Angeles last month, raising $4 million for the Harris campaign. , fundraising content signed by Obama and events featuring him have generated more than $76 million for Democrats this cycle.
Biden, for his part, said he would do everything he could to help Harris defeat Trump after he exited the race and endorsed her. But since then, he has campaigned alongside Harris just once.
