Heading into the Iowa caucuses, on February 3rd, Senator Amy Klobuchar, of Minnesota, was speaking like a candidate who’d been given bad news. “It is the first state,” she said of Iowa, where she was lagging in the polls, “but there’s many to follow.” Sensing the mood, reporters were ready with gloomy questions. Jonathan Martin, of the Times, wanted to know how well she would have to do in the caucuses in order to justify continuing on to the New Hampshire primary. Or, put another way, how poorly could she perform and still remain in the race. “Fourth?” he asked, at a gaggle following an event. Klobuchar, who repeatedly reëngaged with Martin after initially walking away, wouldn’t be pinned down.

In the end, Klobuchar came in fifth in Iowa, unofficially earning around twelve per cent of the vote. That result was good enough for her campaign to march on to New Hampshire—from one icy state to another. When she arrived, her poll numbers there were similarly dismal, yet, following what was judged as her strong debate performance in Manchester, her persistence was rewarded. On February 11th, during the New Hampshire primary, she came in a surprising third place, with nearly twenty per cent of the vote, behind Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg but well clear of Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, two candidates who had once been considered front-runners.

Was this a surge, as cable news was calling it? Klobuchar’s campaign announced that it had raised more than twelve million dollars since the New Hampshire debate. Still, the primary model at FiveThirtyEight, as of Thursday morning, gives Klobuchar no better than a two-tenths of a per cent chance of securing the Democratic nomination. News reports this week talked about the campaign scrambling to extend its success to Saturday’s Nevada caucuses. The Washington Post reported that the Klobuchar team had no campaign bus there, so staffers had to drive the one they’d used in New Hampshire across the country. Despite the long odds and logistical limitations, watching Klobuchar, you see a candidate and her supporters beginning to tell themselves a new, more hopeful story about the race ahead.