Klobuchar can come across as a combination of the A-student whose hand always shot up first in class, only to get annoyed when the teacher called on someone else, and Selina Meyer from Veep; early campaign stories said she berates her staff and once ate salad with a comb. “Guess who’s the highest-ranking Democrat on the antitrust committee?” she said in a speech, before pointing both index fingers at herself: “Me!”

In 2008, Barack Obama managed to make Americans see themselves in his story—the half Kenyan, half Kansan who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, representing the America that people wanted to believe had come, or was coming. Similarly, Klobuchar hopes to get Americans to see themselves in her family’s story: her grandfather, a miner, saving money in a coffee can to send her father to community college; her father, a journalist who struggled with alcoholism, making sure she got to college herself.

But while Obama sold the excitement of a new frontier, Klobuchar is trying to sell the comfort of the familiar. “Sometimes people thought when this started, We have to have someone exactly like Barack Obama,” Klobuchar told me. “I think that’s because we love Barack Obama. But maybe what people want is something different right now,” she said. “They don’t have to come in the same package.”

“I say this is America,” she said on the debate stage when questioned about how she would attract attract minority voters. “You’re looking at it.”

Quinton Lucas, who was elected mayor of Kansas City in June, recently heard Klobuchar speak at a mayor’s forum in Iowa. “I saw Senator Klobuchar as the kind of person who told us what we couldn’t afford,” he told me a few days later. In her, he saw a candidate “whose story related to the people in the room and to this guy, who’s a black guy from inner-city Kansas City; [she was] talking about gun violence, talking about infrastructure and local government.

“Getting her away from the giant debate stage helps. She may not be one for quips, but she certainly connects with people,” Lucas continued. “I don’t know if at this point in the election she has a chance to get that in-front-enough of people—but if she did, I think there would be a broad reassessment of her and her candidacy.”

Waukon is not far from the border corner where Iowa meets Wisconsin and Klobuchar’s native Minnesota. This is a part of Iowa that, in 2018, helped Democrats flip a Republican seat in the House of Representatives—but on that same day helped reelect the Republican governor. On a freezing Saturday morning at the beginning of December, Klobuchar spoke to about 100 people in the common room of a wellness center.

For Klobuchar, everything is rooted in her Minnesota-ness—from the constant Vikings references, to the way she says sorry, to a foreign policy she says is based in midwestern values, to how she discusses immigration citing not abstract principles but a hardheaded analysis of costs and benefits. When she addresses climate change, she talks about homeowner’s-insurance prices going up, fields getting harder to plant. She focuses on its midwestern impact. People didn’t care much when the climate discussion was about “an ice sheet over in Greenland,” she told me. “When there are increased tornadoes or there’s increased flooding, those are real things” that affect the Midwest. To do anything about this before it’s too late, she says, we’ve got to dislodge the climate-change denier occupying the White House—and that will require midwestern votes.