On a recent swing through Iowa, Sen. Amy Klobuchar hammered home her message that it’s vital to win “heartland” states to win the White House, saying Democrats need to take their pitch beyond party stalwarts.

“There’s a lot of other people that are dissatisfied with Donald Trump,” the Minnesota Democrat told a local TV station outside a stop in Mason City. “I think we’d be doing a disservice to the citizens of this country if we didn’t also reach out to them.”

A crowd packed a room at the Historic Park Inn Hotel to see Ms. Klobuchar, the latest of the more moderate 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls to get a second look from voters.

Some are responding to her pitch that, as a native daughter of the Midwest, she can win back Trump supporters in key Rust Belt states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.

Those blue-collar voters were the linchpin of Mr. Trump’s upset victory in 2016.

“We’ve met her and we know her and we like her,” said JoAnn Hardy, a top Democratic Party official in Cerro Gordo County who talked up the Park Inn event. “I think she definitely has the potential — she’d make a great president. It’s just trying to break through the pack.”

To break through, she needs to get past Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, another more moderate candidate vying to supplant former Vice President Joseph R. Biden as the mainstream favorite in the race.

Ms. Klobuchar is enjoying a mini-surge lately. She qualified for next month’s debate and raked in more than $2 million in contributions in the immediate aftermath of this month’s debate, where she turned heads by pressing Sen. Elizabeth Warren to explain how she plans to pay for her universal Medicare for All health care proposal.

Fresh off a swing through New Hampshire, Ms. Klobuchar hit 5% support in the Granite State in a CNN poll released on Tuesday after not registering at all in a July poll.

Her net favorability rating in New Hampshire has jumped 13 points since July, which was second only to entrepreneur Andrew Yang’s 15-point increase.

“New Hampshire voters are starting to tune into the primary in a serious way, and they are seeing that Amy Klobuchar is the candidate who will unite Americans behind her message of not only winning but winning big in November 2020,” said Scott Merrick, New Hampshire state director for the Klobuchar campaign.

She has opened a handful of field offices and has held about 30 events across all 10 counties in the state, according to her campaign.

Though she’s certainly looking to capitalize everywhere, a strong performance in Iowa, which shares a border with Minnesota, could be vital to propel her candidacy beyond the early state contests.

In a recent “state of the race” memo, Ms. Klobuchar’s campaign described her as “the senator next door” to Iowa, site of the first-in-the-nation caucuses.

“She’s won every race, every place, every time,” campaign manager Justin Buoen said in the memo. “She is uniquely qualified to win and will do so in a way that brings not just progressives, but independents and moderate Republicans along with her.”

Ms. Klobuchar has opened 10 offices across Iowa, and her campaign said she has secured more endorsements from current and former Iowa state legislators than any other candidate in the race.

Ms. Hardy said the senator is relatively well-known in the northernmost parts of the state after she crossed the border to campaign for candidates in state legislative races in the past.

Ms. Klobuchar gained attention nationally during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh last year.

Justice Kavanaugh ended up apologizing to Ms. Klobuchar after she had asked him if he had ever had so much to drink that he couldn’t remember prior events. The justice had fired back by asking her the same thing.

“She’s young, vigorous,” said Dan Callahan, a top Democratic Party official in Buchanan County, Iowa. “Her and Buttigieg both are Midwest people. They speak to our values, and both of them are making kind of a strong move right now, it looks like.”

Support for Ms. Klobuchar ticked up slightly from last month in an Iowa State University poll taken after the debate, though she was still in the fifth position at 4%.

Mr. Biden sunk to fourth place, and a significant chunk of the former vice president’s previous supporters shifted to back Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar, said Dave Peterson, a Whitaker-Lindgren Faculty Fellow in Political Science at Iowa State University.

“She benefited from Biden’s fall,” he said. “I think the debate performance has helped Klobuchar — she got a decent amount of attention from that. And she’s been doing a lot of events in Iowa.”

But it could take something seismic — such as Mr. Biden deciding it’s in the party’s best interest for him to pull out — for candidates such as Ms. Klobuchar to truly break into the upper tier of contenders, said Cary Covington, a political science professor at the University of Iowa.

“I don’t expect that to happen. Jeb Bush didn’t do it. I don’t expect Joe to do it,” Mr. Covington said. “But if he were to do that, that would open the logjam for all of these candidates who are sort of standing in his shadow right now.”

“As long as he’s in the race, [Cory] Booker and Klobuchar in particular and Kamala Harris to a lesser extent — they just can’t get out from behind that,” he said.

Sign up for Daily Newsletters Manage Newsletters

Copyright © 2020 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.