FARGO, N.D. — On an unseasonably cold spring day this week, Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp entered a meeting with a group of foster care workers who greeted her with the kind of warm familiarity that she is hoping might help save her job.

In this small state's largest city, Heitkamp found plenty of friendly faces — she hugged a former intern, reminisced with a woman whose children were delivered by the senator's physician-husband and chatted with a fan of the local radio show hosted by Heitkamp's brother.

Those are the kind of deep connections the first-term senator is banking on to shelter her from the coming waves of Republican attacks in what is billed as one of the most competitive races in the country.

Heitkamp is, after all, a Democrat in a ruby red state that President Donald Trump won by 36 points in 2016. And she will face North Dakota's at-large GOP congressman, Kevin Cramer, in the general election this fall.

But Heitkamp dismisses the simplicity of that red-state characterization. “I spend a lot of time in North Dakota,” she told NBC News. “That’s something that’s really hard for national political pundits to gauge.”

Affectionately known simply as Heidi by almost everyone in the state, the junior senator has expanded her network far beyond Mantador, the small town of 80 residents where she was raised as part of a family of seven children. Now she floats effortlessly through the state with a population over 750,000 who could help determine the balance of power in the United States Senate.

With the Senate in recess last Wednesday, Heitkamp, who prides herself on rarely wearing a coat even in below freezing temperatures, spent the frigid day making and remaking connections, traveling to five events in four towns.

In each location, her connections to the state and the people were on display.

Heitkamp noted that her cousin works at a local television station in Fargo. A little girl at an elementary school presentation in the town of Mayville showed Heitkamp a six-year old newspaper clipping with a picture of the two of them. She asked Heitkamp for her autograph and and a hug. Over lunch in Hillsboro at the only cafe in town, fellow diners constantly interrupted her lunch to chat. One gentleman picked up her tab.

Despite that coziness, she is still a Democrat from a rural state in a country that is increasingly politically and regionally divided.