The line outside the Apollo Theatre on Wednesday morning snaked along 125th Street and up Frederick Douglass Boulevard, before curling onto 126th. “The next President is going to be here: we love her!” Fanta Kouyate, a child-services worker who had come across the Harlem River, from the Bronx, volunteered. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Harriet Natkin, an Upper West Side resident who had come with a couple of friends, said. “I’m a very big Hillary supporter.”

With the Secret Service forcing everyone who entered the famous Harlem theatre to go through an airport-style security screening, the line was moving slowly. But the sun was shining and the crowd was good-natured and expectant. The New York primary is less than three weeks away, and, regardless of what happens in Wisconsin, next Tuesday, it could be a pivotal moment. If Clinton defeats Bernie Sanders comfortably in New York, as the opinion polls suggest she will, that could be it for the Vermont senator’s hopes of winning the Democratic nomination. But if Sanders were to shock everyone by defeating Clinton in her adoptive home state, all bets would be off.

“I like Bernie a lot—I saw him in Brooklyn last summer. But I just feel more comfortable with Hillary and her experience,” Gerion Edberg, a sixty-year-old Hell’s Kitchen resident who works in I.T., said to me. He told me that he had backed President Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, but was now in Clinton’s camp. “She is more electable,” he said. “Keeping out the Republicans is the most important thing.” There were plenty of young people in line, too, although not as many as you would see at a Sanders rally. “Hillary is the most qualified candidate for the job, and it’s time for there to be a woman leader,” Vicki Wang, who is twenty-four and grew up in Arkansas, told me. “I think Bernie is too extreme—a bit unrealistic about what he is trying to accomplish.”

As noon beckoned, virtually everybody had made it inside. The theatre, which holds around fifteen hundred people, wasn’t quite full; the upper mezzanine, where I was sitting, still had plenty of spare seats. But the crowd quickly grew boisterous, as Charles Rangel, the eighty-five-year-old Harlem congressman and longtime Clinton ally, made a brief appearance, sashaying across the stage. Renée Elise Goldsberry, a Harlem resident and a cast member of the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” sang the national anthem, before giving way to Chuck Schumer, Clinton’s former colleague in the U.S. Senate, who delivered a rousing warmup speech.

Leavening his patter with references to Sylvia’s and other local eateries, Schumer, a natural communicator, described Clinton as someone who understands the fear and hopes of hard-working Americans, and who accomplishes things. He singled out her role in persuading the government to provide health benefits and financial aid to 9/11 rescue workers, obtaining federal aid to clean up Long Island Sound, and passing the Brady Bill. “That’s what I know about Hillary Clinton; that’s what New York knows about Hillary Clinton,” Schumer said. “She delivers.”

As Schumer sang her praises, the crowd interrupted him with chants of “Madam President,” and Clinton smiled broadly. She’d spoken in Harlem in February, focussing her speech on systemic racism and outlining a plan to tackle it. At the time, she was seeking to burnish her credentials with minority voters in advance of Super Tuesday and its slate of primaries in the South. The strategy worked, but it didn’t finish off Sanders, who is challenging Clinton to agree to a televised debate in New York.

Clinton didn’t mention that entreaty. After thanking Schumer for the introduction, she said how thrilled she was to be “live at the Apollo,” and saluted Rangel and Gale Brewer, the Manhattan Borough President. (Mayor Bill de Blasio wasn’t there.) Then she began a broad-ranging speech, which echoed some of the themes that Schumer had raised.

“For me, it’s all about getting results,” she said, listing some of her policy proposals, such as expanding day care, raising the minimum wage, and introducing paid family leave. She recalled her efforts to combat the prevalence of asthma among children in Harlem, before saying, “Some folks have the luxury to hold out for the perfect. But a lot of Americans are hurting right now, and they can’t wait for that. They need the good, and they need it today.”

That was a clear shot at Sanders and his supporters. She followed it up by arguing that most of her opponent’s proposals wouldn’t get passed, that his “numbers don’t add up,” and that he had voted with the National Rifle Association on many occasions. Whether this sort of rhetoric helps Clinton much can be debated. (I haven’t met any Democrats who refuse to vote for Sanders because they regard him as a shill for the N.R.A.)

The biggest reaction she drew from the audience came when she reiterated her call for equal pay for women. “Republicans say that when I talk like this I’m playing the gender card,” she said. “My answer is very simple: if fighting for equal pay and for a minimum wage is playing the gender card, then deal me in.” The crowd cheered loudly and broke into chants of “Deal me in! Deal me in!”

Moving on to the Republican candidates, the very mention of whom drew boos from the crowd, Clinton lambasted Donald Trump’s endorsement of torture and Ted Cruz’s call for special police patrols in Muslim neighborhoods, saying, “That doesn’t make them sound strong. It makes them sound in over their heads.” She went on, “It’s cynical, it’s wrong, and it goes against everything New York and America stands for.”

After upbraiding the Republicans, Clinton invoked the story of Mohammad Salman Hamdani, a Pakistani-born paramedic for the New York Police Department, who was killed on 9/11 as he tried to rescue people at Ground Zero. “Mohammad was an immigrant,” Clinton said. “He was a New Yorker. He was an American. And he died trying to help others live. It’s up to us to make sure that his and so many others’ sacrifice counts for something, and we do that by standing up to bigotry in all its forms.”

Clinton readily admits that she isn’t a natural orator, but Hamdani’s story provided a moving ending to an event that she appeared to enjoy thoroughly. After she had finished talking, she stayed onstage for about fifteen minutes so that audience members could take selfies with her. Then she left via the back entrance, on 126th Street. The New York primary, the first since 1992 that has mattered very much, had started in earnest.