Over the next half hour, her fire was directed left and right: at Democratic leaders and President Donald Trump, at Saudi Arabian monarchs and plutocratic warmongers, all of whom have become the bogeymen — or bogeywomen, in the case of Hillary Clinton — of her scrappy presidential campaign.

CONCORD, New Hampshire — About 50 of her most devoted and bundled-up supporters gathered in the cold on the statehouse steps last week to watch Rep. Tulsi Gabbard firebomb the establishment.

Gabbard recently polled at 5 percent here, outlasting sitting senators and governors by securing a spot on the November 20 debate stage. Just 1 percent higher in two more New Hampshire polls would meet the Democratic National Committee’s threshold for entry to the upcoming debate in Los Angeles. And from there on, who knows?

“When I heard Hillary do that, the first thing I said was, ‘Oh my god,’ and the second thing I said is, ‘This is going to be great, because that's going to really help Tulsi,’ — and it has,” said Peggy Marko, a Gabbard supporter who's a physical therapist in Candia, New Hampshire. “She has crossover appeal … and I think the folks in New Hampshire especially value that.”

Her campaign got a polling bounce here after Clinton implied on a podcast that Gabbard is a Russian stooge and Gabbard replied in a tweet that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers” leading a conspiracy to destroy her reputation. Clinton is not exactly beloved in New Hampshire, after all; Sen. Bernie Sanders blew her out in the 2016 primary before she went on to beat Trump by just under 3,000 votes.

It was an unusual speech to deliver directly after filing the paperwork to run in New Hampshire, especially amid a Democratic primary field almost preternaturally occupied with health care. But Gabbard is an unusual candidate. And that’s exactly what is giving the four-term representative’s improbable presidential run a toehold in this early primary state.

“We're seeing support coming from people across the political spectrum and building the kind of coalition that we need to be able to defeat Donald Trump, and it's encouraging,” Gabbard told VICE News.

So as candidates like Sen. Kamala Harris and Julián Castro have all but given up on the Granite State, Gabbard is digging in. This notoriously nonpartisan place is her ticket to staying in the race. Independent voters make up 40 percent of the electorate, and the state’s semi-open primary laws allow anyone to change affiliation up to the day of the primary to vote for whomever they want.

Gabbard’s campaign is lean in the extreme. She raked in about $3 million in the last fundraising quarter, less money than other candidates still on the debate stage. She also has few paid staff. Her sister acts as a sort of campaign manager, though she was not on this trip. Her husband follows her around with a camera, filming campaign promotional videos, often of her working out. Her ground team in New Hampshire is mostly volunteer women from Hawaii in their early twenties and a smattering of other young people from around the country working for free.

Gabbard’s slash-and-burn appearance at the state house couldn’t be more different than her usual stump speech, in which she gives a long spiel about the meaning of “Aloha” and reminisces about winning over Republican colleagues in Congress with care packages of her mom’s homemade macadamia nut toffee.

That was how she began a recent evening house party in front of about 100 people packed into the Nashua, New Hampshire living room of Matt Gravel, a stay-at-home dad whose husband Jay works at Southern New Hampshire University. Gabbard impressed Gravel with her debate performance, when she undressed Harris for her record on criminal justice. Now he’s a die-hard fan, and he just financed some unique campaign swag to help spread the word: A pin-on strand of grey hair mimicking the candidate’s distinctive skunk streak.

Gabbard famously resigned from a leadership role at the DNC during the last presidential primary over objections to how they handled Sanders’ candidacy. Because of that, she has built up a reservoir of good will among Berniecrats. Her problem among that constituency, of course, is that Sanders is still in the presidential race too.

“I certainly like everything that Tulsi has to say. I still love Bernie.”

“I certainly like everything that Tulsi has to say. I still love Bernie,” said Melanie Shields, a plant geneticist at the University of New Hampshire, after one of Gabbard’s events. “I'm very far left, and I think that she's probably a far more conservative person than I am and I also get the impression that her heart is in making the moves she feels are necessary, so I'm very happy to keep considering her.”