Barack Obama will go on the road to campaign for Kamala Harris next week as she and her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, prepare to crisscross the battleground states that will probably decide the 2024 presidential election, now just one month away.
After what is increasingly being seen as a strong showing for the Republican JD Vance over Tim Walz in the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday and a week dominated by the devastation of Hurricane Helene and controversial statements from Trump and his wife, Melania, former president Obama will be hoping to inject fresh energy into the Harris campaign.
Trump, meanwhile, returns on Saturday to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where he survived an assassination attempt in July, where he will campaign alongside Elon Musk, who openly endorsed him for the first time in the moments following the shooting.
Obama will kick off in all-important Pennsylvania next Thursday, according to a senior Harris campaign official, the beginning of a blitz across the string of Rust belt and Sun belt battleground states, in an effort to break through in a race that is mostly in a dead heat.
“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,” Eric Schultz, a senior Obama adviser, said in a statement.
Obama remains one of the Democrats’ most powerful surrogates, second perhaps only to his wife, Michelle Obama. His return to the campaign trail follows a rousing speech at the Democratic national convention in August, in which he cast Harris as a forward-looking figure and a natural heir to his diverse, youth-powered political coalition.
“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told the convention in August. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter.”
On Friday, three Democratic Senate candidates running in competitive races in Michigan, Maryland and Florida launched ads featuring the former president. An aide said it was the first release in a series of candidate-specific ads and robocalls that Obama will record to support key down-ballot races in closely contested races.
Last month, Obama headlined his first solo fundraiser for Harris in Los Angeles, bringing in more than $4m for her campaign.
Harris was one of Obama’s earliest supporters when he launched a long-shot presidential bid against Hillary Clinton in 2007. She would go on to knock on doors for him ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008. In 2010, as president, he endorsed Harris in her successful bid to be the attorney general of California. At the time, he called Harris “a dear, dear friend of mine”.
“I want everybody to do right by her,” he said then.
Though Obama remained publicly silent following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump this summer, he was considered to be among the party elders who helped the president realize that his path to victory in November had all but disappeared.
Harris’s campaign, the structure of which she inherited from Biden, already includes several former Obama campaign staff. Among them are strategist David Plouffe, Stephanie Cutter – who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 – and Mitch Stewart, Obama’s grassroots strategist for both campaigns. Stewart is Harris’s adviser for battleground states, among which Pennsylvania is seen as a must-win for either side.
Musk has said he will attend Trump’s Saturday rally in Butler, at the same site where a would-be-assassin opened fire, bloodying the former president’s ear and killing one of his supporters.
“I will be there to support!” Musk replied to a post from Trump on X. “Butler on Saturday–Historic,” Trump tweeted, including the dramatic photo of himself raising a fist as he was pulled off stage by Secret Service during the shooting.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, where he increasingly boosts rightwing causes and amplifies misinformation, officially endorsed Trump after the July assassination attempt. Trump was the target of what the FBI said appeared to be a second attempted assassination at his Florida golf club last month. Trump was safe and the suspect was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate the Republican presidential nominee.
As Trump draws fundraising and support from tech industry executives in Silicon Valley, seen as a bastion of liberalism, Harris announced support on Friday from a trio of prominent business leaders, including Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn; Mark Cuban, an entrepreneur and part-owner of the Dallas Mavericks; and Reed Hastings, a co-founder of Netflix. The group launched a podcast, titled Business Leaders for Harris.
Harris is in Michigan on Friday, after appearing in Wisconsin at an event with Liz Cheney, one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics. On Saturday, when Trump is in Pennsylvania, Harris will travel to North Carolina, another swing state, to survey the damage wrought by Hurricane Helene. Earlier this week she visited battleground Georgia, which was also badly hit, and promised the Biden administration would deliver federal resources to assist with the damage. “We are here for the long haul,” she told residents.
In his own visit to Georgia on Monday, Trump attacked Biden’s response to the storm, for which his administration has received bipartisan plaudits. He falsely asserting that the president had been “sleeping” when the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, tried to call. Kemp refuted the claim.
Polling averages show Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in national and battleground state surveys. In several states, ballots have already been mailed out.
Leaving the White House on Thursday, Biden said he was hardly surprised by the razor-thin margins but expressed confidence that Harris would defeat his predecessor.
“It always gets this close,” the president told reporters. “She’s going to do fine.”
