HATFIELD, Pa. — Hillary Clinton would like to discuss some football.

"My dad played football at Penn State," she reminded a crowd here during her swing through the Rust Belt. "My brother played football at Penn State."

Bill Clinton came along to stand sentinel onstage, adjusting his schedule to linger a day longer than planned among his wife's chief skeptics: the voters who look like him.

And during the bus tour's three-day slideshow of American brawn — a whir of iron, hard hats, factory dust and well-placed American flags — even Hillary Clinton's entrance music had changed: She was now taking the stage to a Motown classic, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," sidelining a rotation of female pop stars.

In her first general election road trip after accepting the Democratic nomination for president, when she took stock of her historic feat as "my mother's daughter and my daughter's mother," Clinton rumbled by bus through the heart of the white male resistance.

There is no group that views Clinton with greater antipathy. A New York Times/CBS News poll two weeks ago found that white men preferred her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, to Clinton almost 2 to 1, 55 percent to 29 percent. (White women were split at 40 percent each.)

Yet in these two states, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which Trump will almost certainly need to win the presidency, Clinton aides sense an opportunity to put him on defense. They need not catch Trump among white men, or even come particularly close. But chipping away could be decisive, given their massive advantages among nonwhite voters in cities like Philadelphia and Cleveland.

"Donald Trump needs to prevail in the very regions we crisscrossed this weekend," said Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton, noting that Trump would be campaigning in some of the same areas this week. "As this bus trip shows, we are not conceding a single county, a single town or a single voter to him."

Traveling in a bus emblazoned with her "Stronger Together" slogan, Clinton wound past urban hoagie hubs and heaps of hay bales, moldering rowhouses and cows indifferent to a droning motorcade.

She appeared with her two top ambassadors to white men: Bill Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Although Bill Clinton spoke only briefly from the stage, introducing Kaine in Harrisburg, he remains a peerless worker of crowds. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he held forth with employees at a manufacturing company beside a massive spool of wire. In Youngstown, Ohio, he gabbed with voters until both members of the Democratic ticket had disappeared from view.

Hillary Clinton has summoned the full range of her folksiness, signing autographs on hard hats and talking up her own red-blooded culinary tastes.

"Hot peppers!" she shouted at one point to the Youngstown crowd, stuffed inside a high school gym just before 11 p.m. Saturday. "I started eating hot peppers back in '92. I'm still eating them, and I'm still standing, and I'm still ready to go to the White House!"

A sign near the stage carried reason for hope among Clinton partisans: "I am male, white, over 40, Southern Baptist pastor," it read. "And I'm with her."

Others remain holdouts.

In interviews in recent weeks at events across the country, several undecided white male voters described a persistent, visceral dislike of Clinton, by turns lamenting her embrace of President Barack Obama, her desire to increase gun restrictions and what they see as her consistent aversion to the truth.

"Stop fibbing," said Ted Schaible, 61, when asked at a toy factory here what could persuade him. "It costs a lot of money to track down those fibs."

Schaible, a retired carpenter, had joined his wife, Cheryl, a vocal Clinton supporter, at the event. He allowed that Clinton's jobs-focused speech had included some appealing touches.

"See, I swayed him already," Cheryl Schaible said.

Her husband shook his head.

Clinton's team might settle for such a split in white households. The campaign is generally underperforming relative to Obama's 2012 numbers with white men, leading aides to believe there are still minds to be changed. But she is outperforming Obama with white women.

In particular, the campaign is targeting college-educated whites, a group that Mitt Romney won handily four years ago. Clinton's relative success with this portion of the electorate has improved Democratic prospects in states like Colorado, where the Clinton campaign recently pulled ads in a sign of growing confidence. A recent CNN/ORC poll gave her a lead of 5 points nationally, 44 percent to 39 percent, among white voters with college degrees.

At the same time, across regions where blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and other sectors have evaporated, Clinton is attempting a delicate balancing act: insisting she is not satisfied with the economy even as she defends Obama's work, positioning Democrats as the party of optimists.

"We like being the upbeat, positive people," Kaine said in Johnstown, hours before entertaining fellow campaign bus passengers with a harmonica rendition of "Wagon Wheel."

Clinton allies believe that surrogates like Kaine, Bill Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden could be best positioned to make Hillary Clinton's case for her in front of wary audiences. Biden is scheduled to campaign with Hillary Clinton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, his birthplace, on Aug. 15.

For the hearty minority of white male attendees, Clinton's standard events can already be a heady brew. The men shuffle along in loafers or boots, brushing past young girls in bejeweled jackets, decorated with Clinton's name and likeness.

They chuckle at, and occasionally wear, "Bill for First Lady" shirts. There are extended stretches when the soundtrack, still heavy on Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, reaches peak machismo with a Hall and Oates song, "You Make My Dreams Come True."

"A world of women," John Kochis, an app developer, said at a recent event in Raleigh, North Carolina, where a female gospel choir crooned behind him.

Some marveled at their own uncommon voter profile, wondering aloud how they had not become Trump voters.

"I'm a white non-college!" said Michael Gitt, 55, waiting for Clinton to arrive in Harrisburg. "I'm not straight, so that helps."

In every crowd, the anomalies lie in wait.

As Clinton's rally in Pittsburgh ended Saturday, Don Toy, 63, was strolling out quietly with his wife, Helen. Suddenly, a Jennifer Lopez song came on. Don Toy, a mustachioed former physical education teacher, began dancing in his Crocs, breaking into a sort of rhythmic jog.

Most people say Clinton cannot win men like her husband, Helen Toy allowed. But they also say white men can't dance.