Michelle Obama, a reluctant campaigner, hits the trail with Harris

WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama, one of the Democratic Party’s most popular and elusive surrogates, is rallying alongside Vice President Kamala Harris in Michigan on Saturday, making her return to the campaign trail less than two weeks before Election Day.

With the race against former President Donald Trump virtually deadlocked, the Harris campaign is deploying Obama as part of a flurry of activity to mobilize voters to the polls. The former first lady has high approval ratings from groups of voters the Harris campaign is trying to reach in the final stretch of the election, including suburban and Black Americans.

On Saturday, Obama is scheduled to visit Kalamazoo County, a moderately liberal, predominantly white slice of southwestern Michigan that is home to a subset of those voters: Michiganders who overwhelmingly chose Nikki Haley over Trump in the states’s Republican primary election. Harris is hoping to attract those voters and has aggressively courted moderate independents and Republicans, especially women.

Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of Obama and a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said Michelle Obama had a “keen appreciation” for the job her husband had held and the one Harris is seeking, and would most likely use her time onstage to talk about the qualities she believes are important to the presidency. In her own speeches and media appearances, the vice president has spent time drawing a sharp character contrast between herself and Trump.

Michelle Obama’s approach, Jarrett said, could appeal to some of the most coveted slices of voters across battleground states in the days ahead precisely because she is not a politician. Jarrett described Harris and Obama as “friends” and said that the vice president had called the former first lady to seek her counsel, partly because she “has a good pulse” for what people outside conventional politics are saying and feeling about the race.

“I think many of us are so concerned about the acrimony and polarization and toxicity in the zeitgeist right now,” Jarrett said. “I think Michelle Obama uniquely can rise above that and appeal to our better angels.”

Barack Obama has become one of Harris’ most vital surrogates in recent weeks, but Michelle Obama has her own rhetorical gifts.

At the Democratic National Convention in August, Michelle Obama took a more direct and emphatic line of attack against Trump than she ever had in her years as first lady. She offered support and praise for Harris but focused much of her nearly 20-minute speech squarely on Trump, criticizing the man who led a multiyear campaign to question the birthplace of her husband but rarely invoking Trump’s name.

“Kamala has shown her allegiance to this nation, not by spewing anger and bitterness, but by living a life of service and always pushing the doors of opportunity open to others,” Obama said. “She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward.”

But Michelle Obama has not been on the trail in the weeks since the convention. In 2016, she started campaigning for Hillary Clinton in mid-September, although they did not make a joint appearance together until late October. Her early engagement, of course, did not help propel Clinton to victory.

Now, she is hitting the road for Harris relatively late in election season, a decision that people who know her say is largely because she understands that her voice is best used in the most crucial moments before the election, when the Harris campaign is urging people to go out and vote.

“When you get a tied race, every single thing you do matters,” said Bill Burton, a former White House deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, a reference to recent polls showing the race in a dead heat. “So if Michelle Obama or President Obama, or Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz are out there every day, grinding, it’s going to help motivate people.”

Burton also said that Michelle Obama disliked electoral politics during her husband’s first campaign — he was with her when she sat in the back of a van and wrote her first speech as a campaign spouse in 2007. Her lack of interest in the klieg-lit campaign trail has not changed in the years since she came to the national stage.

“She had a very difficult job as the first African American first lady of the United States, and she carved a path that did not exist before in a way that grew a lot of respect for her,” Burton said.

Her scarcity on the campaign trail since, he added, is partly why she is popular. “Her reluctance to have the light shine down on her, I think, is attractive to a lot of people.”

Michelle Obama is expected to make more appearances before the election, although they will not necessarily be in explicit support of Harris. On Tuesday, she will appear at a rally in Atlanta hosted by her nonpartisan voting rights organization, When We All Vote, where she will aim to turn out young and nonwhite voters.