“We didn’t come from millionaire families. My husband’s father died before he was born," Hillary Clinton said Tuesday. | AP Photo Clinton thinks Trump’s privilege is different from hers Eager to connect with working-class voters, the 1 percenter argues she earned her money.

RALEIGH, N.C. — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are two wealthy one-percenters who inhabit parallel bubbles of New York privilege.

For Trump, the gross display of wealth is his gold-encrusted calling card. For Clinton, her Hamptons friends and multi-mansion lifestyle (she closed on a third house in Chappaqua for $1.16 million last month to widen her compound), have been a political liability as she struggles to credibly champion working-class voters.


But on the debate stage Monday and on the campaign trail in North Carolina on Tuesday, Clinton made a strategic shift to show her privilege as different from his: The Clintons came from nothing and lived the American dream; Trump, she said, was just born that way.

“Bill and I have been blessed,” Clinton said at a community college gymnasium here in Raleigh, speaking to a crowd of about 1,400 supporters, where she touted her plans for paid family leave and debt-free college. “We didn’t come from millionaire families. My husband’s father died before he was born.”

Clinton, who has made her own parents’ stories central to her campaign this cycle, rarely mentions William Jefferson Blythe, the traveling Arkansas salesman, killed in a car accident, who was Bill Clinton’s biological father, or Roger Clinton, the alcoholic stepfather who helped to raise him.

But a day after she needled Trump on the debate stage with an opening salvo questioning his business prowess — “he started his business with $14 million borrowed from his father” — Clinton continued to press on the life stories as a new way to explain the candidates' different visions of the country.

Bill Clinton’s “mother taught nursery school in order to support him,” Clinton said. “They struggled. They worked hard. And America gave him the chance to get a good education, to pursue his dreams and end up being president.”

As she prepared for Monday’s debate, Clinton spent a lot of time thinking about the most effective way to draw contrasts, her aides said. And she concluded that it wasn’t just their ideas about the country and the world that set them apart, but that those perspectives were rooted in their vastly different upbringings.

“The suggestion that Fred Trump made Donald really seems to unsettle him, as we saw again last night,” said David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s former chief strategist. “They are in his head.”

In Raleigh, Clinton spoke at length about her mother’s own abused and abandoned childhood, working as a maid and living on her own when she was just 14 years old. Her squeegee-wielding father, Hugh Rodham, who made drapery, she said, “worked hard.” She added: “I’m really glad my dad never had a contract with Donald Trump," a rhetorical strategy that helped place the privileged former secretary of state in the shoes of the stiffed working man.

The more personal explanation of where Clinton and her husband came from — coming a day after she launched a prime-time assault on Trump's rich-boy upbringing — doubles as an American dream story, of the Clintons' rise to the top.

Longtime allies said it marked a real shift in the argument Clinton has been making to voters for the past 18 months. “That’s way more personal than she almost ever is,” longtime Clinton ally Paul Begala said of Clinton’s remarks in Raleigh. “Mostly, what Hillary has done is hidden her heart behind a bullet-proof fortress of policy proposals. Ideas matter, but they cannot convey motive.”

Contrasting the candidates’ upbringings is critical for Clinton, in part because Trump’s message is resonating with working-class voters in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. “You can’t negate that by simply saying it’s bad policy,” Begala added, “but you can say also it’s coming from a guy who is an untrustworthy messenger.”

Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street, her love of a six-figure paid speech and a big donor confab, are parts of her that even admirers can be put off by — and Bernie Sanders’ baggy-suited, man-of-the-people persona was a big part of his progressive appeal. Clinton often talks about her decision to go work for the Children’s Defense Fund straight out of law school rather than join a fancy, white-shoe law firm — but skeptics arch an eyebrow at the fact that she has to reach back four decades into her life to produce that noble moment.

Today, Clinton's net worth is about $32 million; through paid speeches and hefty book advances, the former first couple have earned millions since leaving the White House. Because Trump has not released his tax returns, it is unclear if he is the billionaire he claims to be.

“Bill and I have released all of our tax returns, going back 40 years,” she said Tuesday, noting they pay the highest marginal income tax rate and donate 10 percent of their wealth to charity. “We believe in this country,” she said.

Trump’s steadfast refusal to release his tax returns also allows Clinton to position herself as part of the “us” against him, rather than a fellow member of the unrelateable 1 percent. “If not paying taxes makes him smart, what does that make all the rest of us?” Clinton said.

Clinton scored points Monday night by insinuating that Trump won’t release the returns because he doesn’t pay federal income taxes. On Tuesday, during her post-debate victory lap, Clinton drove the narrative even further, accusing Trump of denigrating the military but at the same time not paying "a penny to support our troops.”

Clinton was in good spirits on Tuesday after she was widely praised for her debate performance. Her aides could be heard cheering from the front of the plane when she boarded her campaign plane in White Plains. In some of the primary debates, Clinton exited the stage feeling uncertain as to whether she had won or lost. That wasn't the case Monday night, one of her top aides said. She didn't need anyone to tell her she had won.

Back on the trail, she seemed to be riding her momentum, noting that Trump “actually rooted for the housing crisis to happen." Speaking briefly to reporters aboard her campaign plane, Clinton said that “anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night."

In contrast, Trump seemed to have no narrative to hang onto, instead defensively doubling down on his personal criticisms of a former Miss Universe who Clinton evoked during the debate.

“Trump had a few moments but didn’t really pull it together,” said Clinton’s former chief strategist, Mark Penn. “He is kind of gyrating all over the place today rather than putting on a good face and moving forward.”