Michelle Obama, the former first lady and among the Democrats’ most popular surrogates, offered a bracing tutorial in the realities of political power on Tuesday night, beseeching thousands of people near Atlanta to vote and to “stop the spiral of disillusionment and apathy.”
“It’s natural to wonder if anyone hears you, if anyone sees you,” Mrs. Obama told her audience, many of them students from Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities, at an arena just south of downtown. “It is healthy to push your leaders to be better, even to question the whole system.”
But, she added, “It’s our job to show folks that two things can be true at once: that it is possible to be outraged by the slow pace of progress and be committed to your own pursuit of that progress.”
Mrs. Obama’s pleas and warnings came as Georgia entered the final days of its early voting period, a stretch in which one participation record after another has fallen. Already, more than 3 million people in the state have cast ballots, according to the secretary of state’s office.
With the state among the most contested this election year — Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Donald J. Trump in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes in 2020 — Georgia voters have faced an onslaught of pressure to pick one side or another.
Mrs. Obama, addressing a rally that was formally nonpartisan and unaligned with any campaign, made a different ask: Vote.
Mrs. Obama tailored her message to her predominantly young audience, alluding to social media sites and television shows while encouraging listeners to “make things just a little uncomfortable” in conversations about voting with the people in their lives. Undecided friends, family and even romantic partners should not be spared, she said.
Disinterest in the political process, she suggested, was perilous.
“We’ve got a lot of folks thirsty for likes from their followers but uninterested in the needs of their communities,” she said. “We’ve got folks excited to vote on reality shows but not willing to vote for their actual reality.”
Tuesday night’s event leaned on celebrity power, including some stars raised in Atlanta. Besides Mrs. Obama, the singers Ciara and Victoria Monét spoke. And moments before Mrs. Obama strode onto the stage, the actress Kerry Washington and the showrunner Shonda Rhimes were among the Hollywood fixtures introducing the former first lady.
Mrs. Obama’s appearance in Georgia came days after she campaigned alongside Ms. Harris in Michigan and made a plain-spoken case against Mr. Trump — a former president, she said on Saturday, with “no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”
But Mrs. Obama’s remarks in Michigan also drew attention for their raw, unvarnished discussion of how she feared Republican power could undercut health care for women.
On Tuesday night, Mrs. Obama avoided explicit references to Ms. Harris, who is banking on support from young voters to win Georgia, or Mr. Trump. Instead, Mrs. Obama’s speech focused on what she depicted as the urgent needs of the moment. She walked young voters through recent American history — but not recent enough for many of them to have lived through — and cited how the 1968 and 2000 presidential elections had shaped the country’s course.
And, pointing to her own decades at the center of global power, she warned her audience that influential people were politically engaged themselves: voting, donating, following the news, deploying lobbyists. They were, she said, all too eager for everyone else to say little and do nothing.
“They could not care less about your apathy,” the former first lady said in a tone of hard-won experience. “In fact, they welcome it. They welcome it! They are happy to be in full control of this game.”
“The process,” Mrs. Obama added, “goes on, with or without you.”
Despite the rally’s officially nonpartisan status, stars of Democratic politics filled the lineup — Ms. Washington, for instance, was an emcee at the Democratic National Convention — and it was not hard to find attendees dressed in Harris campaign apparel or the colors of Ms. Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. The event’s sponsors included the National Education Association and the Service Employees International Union, both of which have endorsed Ms. Harris.
At the end of her remarks, Mrs. Obama led the crowd in a chant that sounded similar to the ones that have become a feature of Ms. Harris’s rallies.
“When we all vote,” Mrs. Obama began.
“We win!” the crowd roared in response.
And when people vote, Mrs. Obama added, “We choose not just the trajectory of our city, our state, our country — we’re choosing the trajectory of our own power.”
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