BOONE, Iowa — Senator Kirsten Gillibrand represents one of the biggest and bluest states in America, anchored by the nation’s largest urban metropolis. But as she made her way across snowy Iowa during her first visit as a presidential candidate, Ms. Gillibrand put far more emphasis on her upstate New York roots, bipartisanship and small-town political ancestry.

She talked about her love of RVs and her family vacation last summer to see a Nascar race — and suggested she could make an RV trip in Iowa this year. She spoke of her faith and finding common ground with Republicans. And she harked back repeatedly to her first run for Congress, in 2006, when she ousted a Republican incumbent in a seat that her pollster warned she couldn’t win because there were “more cows than Democrats.”

“I grew up in upstate New York, a community not unlike this one,” Ms. Gillibrand said as she introduced herself at a house party in Sioux City on Friday evening. Of her first race, she said, “It was a two-to-one Republican district, a lot like the district we’re in today.”

The next morning, inside a cafe in Boone, she told the dozen or so people there: “I really appreciate being in a rural place. I’m from a rural place. I grew up in a rural place. I represented a rural place for Congress.”