Crunch time: Harris to team up with Barack and Michelle Obama next week in key battlegrounds

As the 2024 election showdown between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump reaches the home stretch, Harris will team up next week with arguably the two most popular Democrats in the country.

The Harris campaign announced on Friday that the vice president will join former President Barack Obama and his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama, for get-out-the-vote events in two of the seven crucial battleground states – Georgia and Michigan.

According to the campaign, Harris will team up with the Obamas in Georgia on Thursday, Oct. 24. Early voting kicked off in the key southeastern battleground earlier this week and instantly set a new record.

Harris advisers also said that the vice president will join forces again on the campaign trail in Michigan on Saturday, Oct. 26, the day that early voting gets underway statewide in the crucial Great Lakes battleground.

This will be the first time that Harris has teamed up with either Obama on the campaign trail since she replaced President Biden atop the Democrats’ 2024 ticket nearly three months ago. 

The Obamas – longtime friends of Harris – officially endorsed her for president in July, five days after Biden’s blockbuster announcement that he was dropping his re-election bid and backing his vice president.

The former president and former first lady made the case for Harris during back-to-back headlining addresses at the Democratic National Convention in August in their hometown of Chicago.

And the former president hit the campaign trail for Harris a week ago, in Pennsylvania – which is arguably the most crucial of all seven battleground states that will likely determine the outcome of the presidential election. 

The former president is scheduled to return to the campaign in the coming days, with stops in Tucson, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, Detroit, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. 

With a razor-thin margin of error race for the White House, both the Harris and Trump campaigns are scrambling to win over and turn out voters as early in-person, absentee, and mail-in balloting is now under way in roughly 40 states across the country.

The Harris campaign aims to use these campaign events to boost voter enthusiasm among the vice president’s supporters in order to get out the vote ahead of Election Day on Nov. 5, as well as to boost volunteer engagement to help voter turnout.

States have long allowed at least some Americans to vote early, like members of the military or people with illnesses. Many states expanded eligibility in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic made it riskier to vote in-person.

That year, the Fox News Voter Analysis found that 71% of voters cast their ballots before Election Day, with 30% voting early in-person and 41% voting by mail.

Early voting remained popular in the midterms, with 57% of voters casting a ballot before Election Day.

Fox News Digital’s Kellianne Jones and Rémy Numa contributed to this report.