First lady Michelle Obama, whose last major campaign appearance for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was an emotional speech on Donald Trump’s comments about women, returns to the campaign trail Thursday at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona.
Watch Michelle Obama’s Arizona speech: live stream and what to expect after the Clinton-Trump debate
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Libby Nelson was Vox’s editorial director, politics and policy, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.
Obama is scheduled to speak at 2 pm Mountain Standard Time (5 pm Eastern time). If you want to watch, her speech will be streaming live on C-SPAN.org. Her last speech, at a rally in New Hampshire, also was streaming on the Clinton campaign’s YouTube channel.
Obama has become one of the Clinton campaign’s most effective speakers. Her speech at the Democratic National Convention got rave reviews. She cast herself and President Obama as defenders of American values and Trump as an outsider who sought to destroy them. She spoke movingly about Clinton’s potential place in history as the first woman to be president. And she coined a phrase Clinton has adopted: “When they go low, we go high.”
Obama has become the speaker who says the things Clinton can’t or won’t — whether that’s an impassioned argument against objectifying women or an eloquent paean to Clinton’s place in history.
The only Democratic presidential candidate to win Arizona since 1976 was Bill Clinton, 20 years ago. Deploying Obama’s star power is part of Hillary Clinton’s strategy to become the second. Arizona, which Mitt Romney won handily in 2012, is one of the most tightly contested states in 2016: Clinton has a slight lead in the polling average, and FiveThirtyEight projects that she’s more likely than Donald Trump to win the state.
