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 slide show of American brawn — a whir of iron, hard hats, factory dust and well-placed American flags — even Mrs. 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,” Mrs. Clinton rumbled by bus through the heart of the white male resistance.