Barack Obama went back on a campaign stage on Saturday, October 24, for the first time in this midterm cycle, and he did it twice in one day — in Cleveland in the afternoon and in Detroit at night. Election Day is November 3, which left him ten days to spend on two states where a Senate seat and a governor's office are on the ballot at the same time.
At the Cleveland Public Auditorium he appeared with Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, and with former senator Sherrod Brown, who is challenging Republican Senator Jon Husted. Hours later, at Cass Technical High School in Detroit, he campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee facing former congressman Mike Rogers; Jocelyn Benson, the party's candidate for governor of Michigan, was also at the event. Next week Obama headlines a rally in Georgia with Senator Jon Ossoff and the Democratic candidate for governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms.
The line he used on the administration
Obama summed up the Trump years in a single string of nouns, describing a White House of "chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence." He set the building work at the executive mansion — the ballroom, the helipad installed on the South Lawn — against the price of living, and said the president "should be on HGTV," the cable channel that broadcasts home renovation shows.
He also asked voters to extend the bill to Congress and to state governments rather than stop at the president, and framed the election as a single opportunity: "you get a chance to say enough is enough."
The ad that split Ohio Republicans
The sharpest passage of the Cleveland speech was not about Trump. It was about the television ad Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign is running against Acton, which features her estranged birth mother, Donna Arthur, calling her a liar and raising questions about her mental health. Acton has spoken publicly about a childhood that included homelessness and abuse, and Arthur lost custody of her children decades ago.
"There is no line he will not cross, no low he will not sink to," Obama said of Ramaswamy. Acton answered the ad with four words of her own: "Decency still matters."
The ad is one of the few items in this campaign that has produced criticism inside both parties. Republican officeholders in Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine among them, have asked for it to be pulled. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended it.
What the other side did on the same Saturday
Trump voted in Florida on Saturday, defended the Ramaswamy ad — he described the mother's account as a strong reference — and campaigned that evening in Perry, Georgia, with Republican candidates. From the stage there he referred to Obama's Detroit event and claimed the venue had been empty.
Neither campaign released attendance figures for Saturday's rallies, so the competing descriptions of the crowds are claims rather than counts. What is measurable is the calendar: with nine days left after Saturday, both parties are now spending their most valuable surrogates on the same three states — Ohio, Michigan and Georgia — where a Senate seat and a governor's office are being decided on the same ballot.
Reporting from the Associated Press and CBS News.
