Heidi M. Przybyla

USA TODAY

Hillary Clinton is keeping a lid on Bernie Sanders’ appeal in New York — by touting her Senate record upstate and pounding him on the gun issue in the Big Apple.

It’s a two-pronged strategy to appeal to liberal and black voters around Manhattan on the one issue where she’s to the left of the Vermont senator — firearms — while emphasizing to upstate voters her efforts on jobs as a U.S. senator.

New York is a critical battleground for both candidates, and recent polls show Clinton with a double-digit lead. Though Clinton maintains a large pledged delegate lead over Sanders, a narrower victory in the state she represented in the Senate for eight years would raise questions about her strength as a general election candidate.

Sanders may have his best chance of challenging Clinton upstate, where he’s pushing an offensive on fracking and trade deals that have hurt manufacturing jobs, an issue that helped him pull off a surprise victory over Clinton last month in Michigan. On Tuesday, the Vermont senator opened a Rochester rally blasting Clinton for promoting fracking in other countries while secretary of State.

Sanders has also fared best in states where the population is less diverse, so the demographics upstate, which is whiter than New York City and surrounding areas, could favor him as well.

But Clinton campaign aides believe her efforts as a New York senator for eight years, promoting economic development in communities like Buffalo, will offset Sanders’ potential advantage.

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Her chief policy aide, Jake Sullivan, calls her record a “blueprint” for how she would seek to create good-paying jobs nationwide.

What's more, Clinton figures to fare well in and around New York City, which has a large population of minority and affluent voters, demographic groups that favored her in other states. Perhaps most importantly, New York's primary is closed to independent voters who’ve bolstered Sanders in states like New Hampshire.

Clinton’s sharp focus on Sanders demonstrates the stakes. On Monday, she continued to blast Sanders for a New York Daily News interview in which he appeared to struggle to explain specifically how he would break up big banks, one of his signature issues.

“Under the bright spotlight and scrutiny here in New York, Sen. Sanders has had trouble answering questions,” Clinton told reporters at a diner in Queens. She also noted she’s “far ahead” of Sanders in the popular vote and in pledged delegates.

Sanders' insurgent campaign has won eight of the last nine contests (when the Democrats Abroad contest is included), including the Wyoming Democratic caucuses on Saturday. Yet his streak may be coming to an end unless he can narrow the gap with Clinton in New York and in a series of delegate-rich states that vote a week later, including Pennsylvania and Maryland.

In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders seemed to downplay his chances in New York. “Absolutely we can” win the nomination without winning New York, he said. “I want to do as well as I can.”

Both candidates will have a final opportunity to appeal to the state's voters during a debate in Brooklyn hosted by CNN on Thursday.

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Most of New York’s population is clustered around Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn, where Clinton is in the lead, according to a Monmouth University poll. Sanders is strongest upstate, according to the poll, and it’s there that Clinton is soaking the airwaves with ads about her jobs efforts.

“That was how she broke into New York in 2000, working Albany, Syracuse and Buffalo and in small towns that had never seen a first lady before,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie.

Clinton is running two ads in upstate media markets highlighting her work establishing the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus that now includes 100 companies and her efforts to help farmers in the Finger Lakes region of the state.

Over the weekend, she visited the high-tech suburbs of Albany while her husband, former president Bill Clinton, hit Buffalo.

This week, she’s focusing on areas with larger minority populations, including restaurants and churches in Queens over the past couple of days. She’s emphasizing her support for President Obama as well as her support of gun control measures.

On Monday, Clinton held a town hall with family members of victims of gun violence, highlighting differences between her and her rival, including a 2005 law that gave gun manufacturers immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with their products that Sanders supported while in the House.

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New York passed some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation following the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

“Most of the guns that are used in crimes and violence and killings in New York come from out of state,” said Clinton. “And the state that has the highest per capita number of those guns that end up committing crimes in New York come from Vermont.”

A Brooklyn native, Sanders attended college at the University of Chicago, returned to New York, then left for good in 1968. Still, he's cast himself as a native and sees the contest as a chance to beat expectations in other states along the Eastern seaboard.

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In 2008, Clinton defeated Obama by 17 points in part by touting her Senate record, but the gap will probably be tighter this time, said Dan Gerstein, director of Gotham Ghostwriter and an independent political analyst, who nevertheless said he was "pretty sure" Sanders would still lose.

Still, there are a number of factors helping him, including a backlash to the state’s corruption controversies in Albany.

Politics in New York "are so screwy these days,” said Gerstein.

“To a large degree, Hillary’s a victim of those dynamics and Bernie’s a beneficiary, which is going to probably make the vote closer than it otherwise should be.”