In one of his first appearances supporting Democrats during this year’s midterm campaigns, former President Barack Obama came to Silicon Valley Friday to raise big bucks for the party and meet some of the candidates running in hotly contested House races up and down the state.

Obama headlined a fundraising luncheon for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at the Atherton home of a major Democratic donor. Tickets for the event started at $10,000 and topped out at $237,300 per couple, a Democratic source said.

In total, the event raised close to $2.5 million dollars for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Menlo Park, who attended along with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Obama, sitting on a high stool in the backyard of philanthropists Liz Simons and Mark Heising, gave an upbeat speech that ranged from a high-level discussion of the constitution to the nitty-gritty of the party’s midterm strategy.

He urged the roughly 100 Democrats in attendance to focus on a simple message: “Get out, do the work and vote,” Eshoo said. “He said, ‘I think we overcomplicate things.'”

Many of the party’s candidates in competitive seats in California, Nevada, New Mexico and Washington State were there in person and got face time with Obama. The event — in the zip code with the highest home prices in America — was closed to press.

The former president, who’s one of the most popular politicians in the country a year and a half after leaving office, is expected to campaign publicly with Democratic candidates over the next few months, as well as help them raise money behind the scenes.

“I think he’s hopeful that there’s a new generation of leadership out there speaking on a positive progressive agenda every single day,” said Buffy Wicks, a former Obama campaign advisor who’s now running for a State Assembly seat in the East Bay. “He’s led, and he’s looking for other people to step up.”

Obama didn’t mention President Trump at the event at all, Eshoo said, and the former president has avoided directly criticizing his successor since he left the White House. But he has spoken out against some of Trump’s moves, including the Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. If Democrats are successful in retaking the House or the Senate in November, they could act as a firewall in helping defend Obama’s own policies.

Obama also headlined a fundraiser in Los Angeles on Thursday with singer Christina Aguilera, where he gave Democratic donors a pep talk and urged them to support the party’s candidates. “The simple message right now is that if people participate and they vote, then this democracy works,” he told attendees, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Eric Schultz, a senior Obama advisor, said the former president was focused on “helping the Democratic Party rebuild” but would take a selective approach to his appearances during the midterms.

“When President Obama speaks, he consumes a lot of political oxygen, which suffocates the next generation of leaders from rising,” Schultz said. “He wants to support future Democratic leaders in establishing themselves, building their own profiles, and leading our country. That can’t happen if the spotlight is always on him.”

For many of the die-hard Democrats who paid up to attend the event, seeing Obama again was a breath of fresh air and nostalgia after a year and a half of the Trump White House.

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“You can tell he doesn’t have the world on his shoulders anymore,” Eshoo said of the former president. “I think everyone here feels uplifted.”