Obama to rally support for Harris across key battleground states
By Kevin Liptak, CNN
(CNN) — Former President Barack Obama plans to commence a 27-day campaign sprint for Vice President Kamala Harris next week in Pennsylvania, an adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign said, hoping his star power among Democrats can help propel her to the office he once held.
Openly concerned about Democratic complacency and acutely aware of razor-thin margins in polls, Obama — who, along with his wife, Michelle, is one of the party’s most popular figures — is seeking to help Harris in any way he can, aides have said.
“President Obama believes the stakes of this election could not be more consequential and that is why he is doing everything he can to help elect Vice President Harris, Governor Walz and Democrats across the country,” said Eric Schultz, a senior Obama adviser.
The Thursday rally in Pittsburgh will be the first in a string of events Obama plans to hold across electoral battlegrounds in the weeks ahead of Election Day, according to a senior Harris campaign official.
Aside from rallies, an Obama aide said the former president intends to help Democrats by recording candidate-specific advertisements and lending his name to email solicitations for campaign cash, including for down–ballot races. He headlined a $4 million fundraiser for Harris in Los Angeles last month.
Obama’s office also says he’s cut three ads for Senate candidates: in Michigan, Maryland, and Florida.
The 2024 election, in Obama’s view, is an “all hands on deck” moment, aides have said.
“I wish I could give you a four- or five-point plan as to how we’re going to win this election. Truthfully, the plan is we’re going to push through it,” he said during the California fundraising event, according to excerpts from his office.
The event was Obama’s first solo fundraising appearance for Harris since she secured the Democratic nomination over the summer, and it brought the total amount he’s raised through events and fundraising content for Democrats to more than $76 million, his office said at the time.
There is little question Obama would have offered his campaign talents to President Joe Biden if he’d remained in the race. Still, Obama was among the party elders whose quiet maneuvering over the summer helped Biden, his former vice president, realize that Democrats were headed to almost certain defeat if he stayed on the ticket.
And in his August speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama cast Harris as an inheritor of the political movement he began in 2008, saying she could “chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today.”
He also warned the path to the White House would be steep and require an all-out effort by supporters of Harris.
“It’s up to all of us to fight for the America we believe in. And make no mistake: It will be a fight,” he said.
Campaigning for ‘a dear, dear friend’
Obama and Harris have been acquainted for 20 years. The energy fueling her candidacy and thunderous crowds chanting her name have drawn comparisons to Obama’s history-making 2008 run.
Aides to the former president say his first memory of meeting Harris came during a California fundraising event for his 2004 Senate race.
Four years later, as Obama was mounting a long-shot bid for the White House, Harris bucked many in her party to endorse him over then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, who had the early support of much of the Democratic establishment and many Black leaders.
Harris flew to Springfield, Illinois, to watch him announce his candidacy. A photo from that February day in 2007 shows a windswept Harris – then the district attorney in San Francisco – not onstage or in a VIP room, but among the crowd, waiting for Obama to walk past and shake her hand.
In the lead-up to the 2008 Iowa caucuses, she packed her black down jacket and boots and trekked to Des Moines right after Christmas to join the ranks of Obama’s army of volunteers.
“No job was too small for any of us,” Harris would later recall, “and we spent hours in freezing temperatures knocking on doors.”
Obama returned the favor in 2010, not by knocking on doors but endorsing Harris’ bid for California attorney general. At a Los Angeles rally that helped boost her campaign, he described Harris as “a dear, dear friend of mine, so I want everybody to do right by her.”
Fourteen years later, Obama again hopes the country will do right by his friend — and also prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
A Harris victory, Obama told donors last month, “won’t solve all the crazy that’s out there.”
“But each time we win, it’s solidifying this new future. It is ushering in these new possibilities. Eventually, that will become the new normal and the new reality,” he said.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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