The mood was gleeful as the Democratic presidential nominee spoke to reporters and crowds from North Carolina to New Hampshire

Hillary Clinton’s campaign plane erupted in a wave of applause as she boarded the flight, hours after her first presidential debate encounter with Donald Trump.

Staffers who have been on the trail with her for the past year crowded the private front cabin as the crew prepared for take off to Raleigh, North Carolina, 12 hours after she had left the stage where she had needled and trapped Trump before a record television audience the night before.

The glee was obvious – Team Clinton felt certain they had won – and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, wandered to the back of the plane to tell the travelling press Trump had been exposed as both “unprepared and unhinged” on a night when he simply “unravelled”.



Who won the debate? A round-by-round analysis of Clinton v Trump Read more

Moments later, Clinton appeared from the front of the cabin, framed in the aisle by two blue curtains.



Beaming, she put to rest any lingering doubt about the mood within the campaign after her debate performance.



“We had a great, great time last night,” Clinton said with a grin.



She was engulfed within a scrum of reporters who had to climb on their seats to get a glimpse of the exchange, her first interaction with the press in nine days mostly spent holed up in debate preparations. Those further back were resigned to handing their recorders to colleagues up front, as the cabin was at full capacity for press – a sign of both a critical inflection point in the campaign and the race for the White House entering its final stretch.



Trump is usually the candidate who can be relied upon to reach for a sporting metaphor, but here it was Clinton turning to baseball, comparing herself to the Chicago Cubs superstar Ernie Banks.

“He was so excited about going to play that he’d say, ‘Let’s play two,’” Clinton said. “So I’m looking forward to the next debate and then the one after that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton speaks to reporters aboard her campaign plane before departing for a rally the day after the debate. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

After fielding a handful of questions about the debate and its pivotal moments, the former secretary of state began to walk away but turned again when asked about Trump’s claim that he had a defective microphone. “Anyone who complains about the microphone is not having a good night,” Clinton deadpanned.

It was a marked transformation from just two weeks earlier, when the media was fixated upon Clinton’s diagnosis with pneumonia and her characterization of half of Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables”, an obvious misstep for which she expressed regret.



It was one of the roughest patches of Clinton’s nearly 15-month campaign and coincided with a series of polls simultaneously showing a tightening race, with Trump taking an advantage in some battleground states.



Whether 90 minutes at Hofstra University, at the most watched debate in US history, would change the trajectory of the race remained unclear. But the pendulum appeared to swing back in Clinton’s favor, and the Democratic presidential nominee sought to seize the moment in the days that followed.



“Did anybody see that debate last night? Oh, yes,” Clinton said as she mounted the stage at a community college in Raleigh. “One down, two to go!”



Two scoreboards at both ends of the gymnasium were frozen on the number 45, and the clock stopped at 20.16, optimistically pointing toward Clinton becoming the 45th president of the United States after election day in November.





Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clinton is framed by a clock stopped at 20.16. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

She peppered her usual stump speech with some of her most successful attacks from the debate, goading Trump over his continued refusal to release his tax returns – “Well, maybe he’s paid zero” – and for stiffing the workers whose services left him unsatisfied.



“He made it very clear that he didn’t prepare for that debate,” Clinton said, adding that Trump had knocked her for taking time off the trail to get herself prepared.



“And I said, ‘Yeah. You know what? I did prepare. And I’ll tell you something else I prepared for. I prepared to be president of the United States.’”



As she wrapped up the speech and worked the rope line, the familiar lyrics of Katy Perry blared over the sound system: “You’re gonna hear me roar,” a theme song of Clinton’s campaign. Reporters darted into the crowd, where supporters said they hoped debate night had signalled a turning point with less than six weeks remaining until election day.



Two pieces of good news added to the sense of momentum. First was the news that the conservative editorial board of the Arizona Republic had endorsed Clinton, a groundbreaking moment for a local newspaper that had never chosen a Democrat for president over a Republican since its founding in 1890. Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to carry the state, in 1996 – but polling shows a tight race between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Moments later, John Warner, a retired Republican senator from Virginia, announced he was also backing Clinton over Trump. The second world war veteran’s support could carry weight within the national security community and military veterans in the vital swing state.



Both endorsements fed into one of Clinton’s core arguments – that her opponent, in addition to being a divisive figure, was simply unfit to serve as commander-in-chief.



The following day, Clinton travelled north to another battleground state, arriving in New Hampshire on a blustery autumnal afternoon.



In the snows of February, she lost the state to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, triggering an unexpectedly long and bitter Democratic primary. But the two stood side by side on Wednesday, as she drew upon his star power to galvanize young voters with the promise of a debt-free tuition plan.

Her audience, a mixture of students and parents concerned with college affordability, responded with enthusiastic applause.



Sanders, who endorsed Clinton in July at a rally also held in New Hampshire, implored those in attendance to understand that the election presented a stark choice.

“I am asking you here today not only to vote for Secretary Clinton, but to work hard to get your uncles and your aunts, to get your friends, to vote,” he said.

“This election is enormously important for the future of our country. It is imperative that we elect Hillary Clinton as our next president.”



At the back of yet another gymnasium, this time at the University of New Hampshire, there was a more subtle reminder that the election had entered its final stretch.



A reporter from a Japanese news outlet had turned her back to the stage. She was filming not Sanders and Clinton, but the dozens of reporters who filled several rows of tables while frantically typing at their laptops and largely ignoring the bags of Greek salads and BLT sandwiches provided by the campaign for a travelling press constantly on the move.



Many had taken to the crowd in pursuit of young Sanders supporters, seeking to gauge whether the millennial demographic was finally warming to Clinton’s candidacy. Although she leads Trump among young voters, Clinton has continued to struggle with uneven support from those under the age of 30.



First-time voter Michael Giordano said the debate had helped instill some confidence in Clinton from his perspective. The former Sanders supporter said he was still on the fence, but conceded: “I’m probably going to vote for Hillary Clinton.”



Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for Clinton’s campaign, walked over to the press section at the conclusion of the event for another chit-chat that turned into a full-blown scrum of reporters. Acknowledging there was work yet to do in order to bring young voters to Clinton, Palmieri pointed not only to Sanders, but also to Barack and Michelle Obama as powerful messengers.



The first lady had already increased her visibility on the stump after a memorable speech at the Democratic national convention in July. On Tuesday night, the Clinton campaign also rolled out its first television ad featuring Michelle Obama to air in several key battlegrounds.



“Hillary will be a president our kids can look up to,” Obama says directly to the camera. “A president who believes in our kids and will fight for them every day. That’s why I believe in her.”



The first lady’s appeal could also carry weight with independent-minded and Republican women put off by Trump’s rhetoric toward minorities and women. If in recent weeks Trump’s campaign had sought to soften his image with scripted lines about outreach to African Americans and the rollout of a paid family leave policy, the aftermath of the debate cast a spotlight once more on Trump’s troubled relationship with women.



In one of the defining moments of the opening debate, Clinton successfully baited the former reality TV star by sharing the story of Alicia Machado, the winner of the 1996 Miss Universe pageant, whose physical appearance Trump later derided with nicknames such as “Miss Piggy”. Thirty-six hours later, Clinton had refocused on policy at a roundtable on student loan debt, while Trump walked into a feud with Machado by again taking shots at her weight.



“The reason we’re talking about Alicia Machado today is because Donald Trump insulted her again yesterday,” Palmeri told the press gathered in Durham, New Hampshire.



As reporters continued to pepper Palmieri with questions, the staffer tasked with escorting the travelling press from point A to B tried several times to wrap up the discussion or risk being left behind by Clinton and her motorcade. After meeting with Sanders backstage for 15 minutes, the candidate was scheduled to fly to Boston for another fundraiser in another state.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Audience members cheer while Clinton speaks at a campaign rally in Raleigh. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

The press scurried into a bus, driving past a lonely protest of three voters holding up signs for the Green party candidate, Jill Stein. One banner declared that if there was ever a time to vote for a third party, it was now.



At her Boston fundraiser, a 66-mile journey from New Hampshire accomplished in a speedy 20 minutes by air, Clinton continued to drive home the point that Trump had shown himself to be “temperamentally unfit and unqualified to be president”, an aide said.



Another short flight returned Clinton to New York state, where she owns a home in Chappaqua and where she prefers to sleep when not required to remain overnight on the campaign trail. Three states and 600 miles made for one of the lighter days on the trail.

The following day would be more gruelling, with a plan to hop from New York to Iowa to Chicago and then Florida. But it arrived with a small boost: polling published since the debate, while not definitive, showed Clinton gaining an edge and key groups such as millennials and women turning in her favor.

In another part of New York, the repercussions of the first debate were meanwhile playing out in a decidedly divergent manner: Donald Trump was tweeting his rage at the former beauty queen Machado and railing again at Crooked Hillary and the “VERY dishonest media”.