GORHAM, N.H. — Hillary Clinton trekked to this small town in the White Mountains on Saturday to march in a low-key Fourth of July parade, where she was trailed by a vocal heckler and surrounded by so many cameras that her aides employed a rope to corral the press.

After about 25 minutes of marching at a brisk pace and shaking hands with locals, Clinton headed to a diner where she chatted about policy issues with a handful of late lunchers and then sat down to eat pie with a few of her senior staffers. It was the second leg of her two-day Granite State tour — on Friday, she spoke at a campaign cookout that attracted about 850 people in the liberal enclave of Hanover, vowing: “I take a backseat to no one when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values.”


Meanwhile, Clinton’s main Democratic rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, spent the holiday weekend campaigning in Iowa, where a crowd of about 2,500 people overflowed a Friday evening rally in Council Bluffs. On Saturday, riding high off the energy of the crowd, he marched in two parades, in Creston and Waukee, a Republican-leaning suburb of Des Moines, where the crowd yelled for him: “We love you Bernie, yes we do!”

With seven months to go before the first caucuses in the country, the split-screen appearances offered telling clues to the state of the race between the Democratic front-runner and her insurgent rival on the left. Clinton’s events and appearances are modest and controlled, marked by caution and distance. Despite a double-digit lead over Sanders, she’s still seeking to establish her credentials to her skeptics on the left.

For his part, Sanders is feeding off a wave of liberal enthusiasm and plowing forward with populist grit. He’s embracing his surging underdog role — and the media attention and crowds accompanying it.

Clinton’s van arrived in Gorham just before 2 p.m., when she greeted local elected officials and a union leader inside a pizza parlor. Earlier in the day, she spoke at a grass-roots campaign organizing event outside of Bartlett, New Hampshire, which drew about 100 people at the private home of a supporter.

The parade route — just under a mile along the town’s Main Street, dotted with Clinton campaign posters — was complicated by a persistent heckler who trailed Clinton waving a poster that read “Benghazi,” and yelling out taunts at the candidate (“Carpetbagger!” “Where were you at 3 in the morning when the phone rang!” “Tell us when you were poor!”). Clinton wore a grin-and-bear-it smile as she continued shaking hands. “I’m just having a good time meeting everybody,” she shrugged when asked by reporters about the disruption.

To further complicate matters, Clinton’s advance team, worried that a swarm of over a dozen reporters and cameras were blocking the former secretary of state from seeing the locals along the route, herded the press away from the candidate with the unsightly aid of a rope line. Photographs of reporters being physically dragged along by campaign staffers only bolstered the image of Clinton as press-averse. Republicans pounced on the photographs. “Today, Republican presidential candidates marched in parades across New Hampshire that were open to the public without obstruction from their staff,” New Hampshire Republican State Committee Chairman Jennifer Horn said in a statement.

Despite the disruptions, Clinton managed to interact with a few paradegoers. She stopped to chat with a veteran after an aide pointed her toward Nellie Bagli, who was watching the parade with her disabled son, Jose, 40, a Marine who has been in a wheelchair since being injured by a grenade in Iraq in 2006.

“Thank you for your sacrifice,” Clinton told them, with emotion in her voice. “I’ll be thinking of you.” She told Bagli that the holiday was all about people like her son. But Bagli shrugged off the interaction with Clinton. “I’m not sure yet,” she said regarding which candidate she’ll vote for. Pointing to her son, she said: “I lost a lot here. By losing that much, it’s hard to believe a lot.”

Clinton did not take any questions from the press but told a gaggle of reporters as she headed for the diner: “I love parades; I love walking in parades. We got such a great response, a lot of enthusiasm and energy to celebrate the Fourth of July.”

AP Photo

At her third stop of the day, at Northland Restaurant & Dairy Bar, Clinton spoke with about eight diners before settling into a corner table with two top campaign aides and her state director, Mike Vlacich, in front of thick slices of blueberry and raspberry pie. She refused to answer a question about Donald Trump. “You know, I’m gonna sit down and have some pie,” she said, as a group of reporters was ushered out of the restaurant.

Roughly 1,500 miles away, in central Iowa, Sanders headed into the holiday weekend with the wind at his back and his poll numbers rising to 33 percent in the Hawkeye State. On Wednesday night, he hosted by far the biggest rally of the presidential cycle, attracting roughly 10,000 people at a raucous rally in Madison, Wisconsin. At the Friday rally in Council Bluffs, campaign officials passed out envelopes for campaign contributions and signed up volunteers.

“They cheered when he called for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour,” said a spokesman, in an ebullient statement released Friday evening touting “the biggest Iowa crowd so far for any presidential candidate.” “They applauded when he said it’s time to break up the big banks on Wall Street. They shouted approval when he credited Pope Francis for his call for bold action to prevent catastrophic climate change. They rose to their feet when he said the United States should join every other major country and provide health care as a right of citizenship.”

Sanders received another boost Friday — an endorsement from Larry Cohen, who recently stepped down as president of the Communications Workers of America. “This is not a close call,” Cohen said at a news conference at a Council Bluffs union hall. “This is a guy who for his entire life has been there for working people.”

Members of several other unions — including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the International Association of Firefighters — also attended the event. Organized labor has been a core constituency for Sanders during his time in the Senate, and in a sign of his increasing traction, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka sent a memo this week to state, central and area divisions of the labor federation reminding them that its bylaws don’t permit them to “endorse a presidential candidate” or “introduce, consider, debate, or pass resolutions or statements that indicate a preference for one candidate over another.”

Pete D’Alessandro, Sanders’ Iowa director, said Sanders’ trip showed his appeal throughout the state, and not just in liberal bastions like Iowa City. “This isn’t some regional campaign. The message is resonating everywhere,” he said. The campaign will have 30 to 35 people on the ground in Iowa by the end of the month and has a goal of 75 to 100 people by caucus night next year, D’Alessandro said. Clinton is scheduled to make her fourth visit to Iowa on Tuesday.

Her campaign, meanwhile, shrugged off the rope-line drama with humor and said the day went according to plan. “While the GOP may want to spin a good yarn on this, let’s not get tied up in knots,” spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement. “We wanted to accommodate the press, allow her to greet voters, and allow the press to be right there in the parade with her as opposed to preset locations. And that’s what we did.”