On Thursday night, Klobuchar was at the United Auto Workers hall, the featured guest at the Ankeny County Democrats annual dinner. On Saturday night, Harris was on the other side of town at the United Steelworkers hall, keynoting the Iowa Democratic Party Black Caucus. Klobuchar, as she always does, built her speech up to a quote from Walter Mondale, talking about Jimmy Carter’s presidency: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.” Harris, as is her custom, progressed to a paraphrase of Coretta Scott King: “The fight for justice and the fight for civil rights must be fought and won with each generation.”

Afterward, I asked Klobuchar what she thought being a senator from Minnesota, compared with being a senator from California, would mean to Iowa.

“It means that for me, going south for the winter is going to Iowa. It’s easier to get here,” she said. “It’s important to have a lot of people running, but I am a candidate from the heartland, and it’s an important part of our path to success in the general election.”

Graeme Wood: The two Amy Klobuchars

Was she arguing that senators from the coasts—not just Harris, but Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand—wouldn’t be able to win?

“Senators from the coast have won in the heartland in the past. So I don’t think it’s that. It’s that my No. 1 request was to be on the Agriculture Committee. I served on that committee for 12 years. I’ve played a major role in getting the farm bill passed,” she said. “I know these issues here.”

Klobuchar likes talking about herself as an underdog, and structurally that’s how she started a campaign that many people thought she wasn’t actually going to go through with. She’s short on campaign staff, here and nationally, and arrived with just one person on her payroll and a handful of others who’d come in as volunteers. She had a surge of online fundraising after she announced, but aides have acknowledged in conversations with others that money is going to be a scramble and that her best hope is to scrape by enough to make it through Iowa, and then count on an explosion of interest if she wins to carry her over.

And so she lays it on thick, talking about the two states’ main agricultural exports, or how they both put a premium on butter-carving contests. On the list of ways the states are similar that she read from on Thursday evening: “You have the world-famous matchstick museum, and we have the only museum in the world devoted to Spam—or, as we call it, the ‘Guggen-ham.’”

But her main argument is that the country needs a pragmatic president, and that starts with making a pragmatic argument for why she should be the nominee.

“We need to win. So here’s my deal: I have won every single congressional district in the state of Minnesota, including Michele Bachmann’s, three times,” Klobuchar said, referring to the former congresswoman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate who helped popularize Tea Party politics in the run-up to a campaign that got much more attention than actual votes. With Democrats nationally nervous that Minnesota is in danger of slipping away—in a shocker, it had the smallest margin of any state Hillary Clinton won in 2016, and Trump’s campaign has been public about Minnesota being at the top of its 2020 target list—Klobuchar leaned in.