Hillary Clinton's political ascent can be traced to the time in 1999 when she expressed her support for dairy farmers in the upstate New York village of Endicott. And the summer that year when she shunned Martha's Vineyard to vacation in Skaneateles, New York, and promised voters in the depleted industrial city of Schenectady that as a New York senator she would revive the anemic upstate economy.
The strategy helped Clinton win her 2000 Senate race by double digits, a victory fueled by the unlikely support of white working-class voters in upstate New York who had previously voted Republican but were won over by the first lady's attention to their underserved area.
Now, 16 years later, Clinton is again promising to bring jobs back to the economically depressed region as she courts the people who helped propel her to her first election victory. But this time her message is colliding with a surprisingly potent threat from the left and doubts about her ability to deliver.
Her current effort upstate, which advisers say is critical not just to winning the New York primary on April 19 but to swaying voters nationwide to Clinton's style of pragmatic problem solving, comes as she looks to rebound after losing six of the last seven primary elections to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
In most of those contests, including his 14-percentage-point victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Sanders has captured white voters, particularly those who said the economy was the most important issue. His advisers say he plans to campaign aggressively in economically battered parts of western New York, where he will criticize Clinton's past support of trade deals and ties to Wall Street.
Of all the battles this primary season, the one that will unfold upstate will be the most personal.
As Clinton contemplated a Senate run, upstate represented her test as to whether a polarizing first lady not from New York could win over skeptics in traditionally Republican areas.
In 2016, upstate once again represents a test of whether Clinton's message can resonate, this time among voters who have gravitated to Sanders' brand of economic populism. "Her work as senator in upstate New York can serve as a blueprint for how she would seek to create the good-paying jobs of the future as president," said Clinton's policy director, Jake Sullivan.
At a rally on Monday in Cohoes, Clinton recalled working to obtain funding to invest in the nanotechnology industry in the Albany area. "That's what we need to do across upstate — indeed, across America," she said, vowing to be the "president who brings manufacturing back to upstate New York and America."
While Clinton will continue to campaign in New York City — to solidify her strength among minority voters, who overwhelmingly support her — recent polls show that the fight to win New York could be waged upstate, where she plans to campaign Friday, visiting both the Rochester area and Buffalo.
Clinton leads Sanders by 12 percentage points in New York, but among upstate voters he fares significantly better than Clinton in a matchup against the leading Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, according to a Quinnipiac University poll in late March.
A victory in the area is psychologically, as well as politically, important for her. Clinton harbors an emotional attachment to upstate, even making sure that her State Department office always had a fresh shipment of New York apples and putting wine ice cream from the Finger Lakes on the dessert menu at official dinners. Campaigning in Depew on Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton said her years in the Senate working to help New Yorkers were "the happiest she ever was."
But Clinton's critics say that she failed to deliver on the centerpiece of her 2000 push upstate — a promise to bring 200,000 jobs to New York — and many cities upstate have higher unemployment than when she became a senator. The number of private-sector jobs in upstate New York remained virtually stagnant in the eight years Clinton served in the Senate, according to Department of Labor statistics.
Her 2000 Republican Senate opponent, Rick A. Lazio, called Clinton's jobs promise "a cynical play to attract voters in the hard-hit areas of upstate" and likened it to the unrealistic vows made by Trump in his presidential campaign. "The people were desperate for hope, and some voters embraced the false promise," Lazio said.
To combat Sanders' message, Clinton and a lineup of influential New York surrogates, including Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, plan to take voters down a memory lane of proposals, from the quirky to the conventional, that she advanced to spur the upstate economy.
U.S. Rep. Louise M. Slaughter told a crowd in Rochester on Tuesday that Clinton "brought Japanese businessmen here by the planeload to help us rebuild our economy."
In Depew on Tuesday, Bill Clinton provided an extemporaneous laundry list of his wife's efforts to help the upstate economy, including a partnership with eBay that trained craft-makers in mill towns on the Erie Canal to sell their goods online; an effort to transform a vacant car dealership in Buffalo into an artist's work space; funneling federal funding to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus; and protecting the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station from closure.
"She worked so hard to get you all that money — for things that may seem small," Bill Clinton said, "but if you did it in every city in America, it would make a huge difference."
Defending her economic record upstate, Hillary Clinton has said the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Great Recession and a Republican administration prevented her, as a freshman senator, from fulfilling her jobs promise. "We had a very difficult situation with the Bush administration," said Monday in an interview on "Capital Tonight," an upstate New York politics program.
Robert Hockett, a professor of law at Cornell who specializes in financial regulation and is supporting Sanders, said his anti-trade message would resonate upstate, as it had in other economically ravaged areas.
"Upstate New York is the classic Rust Belt on the one hand and the classic working-poor rural population on the other hand," Hockett said. "The things Bernie wants to do are things this population generally agrees with."
Christopher Ryan, president of the Communications Workers of America Local 1123, which represents Verizon and American Red Cross workers in Syracuse, said that he backed Hillary Clinton in 2000 but that the area had been eviscerated by jobs moving overseas since. He plans to vote for Sanders, whom the union has endorsed.
"You see the weeds growing through the parking lots at factories," he said.
Arlene Maynard, 73, a retired school bus driver from Greece, near Rochester, said Sanders was too far to the left. She plans to vote for Clinton, but thought she would be hurt by the frustration some voters are feeling. "Although they say everything's good, a lot of people don't think it's that good," she said.
Unlike voters in other primary states, many people upstate have met Clinton.
Joan Shearin, 65, a retired respiratory therapist from Batavia, like many local Democrats, spoke fondly of Clinton's time in the Senate, "When something needed to be done, she was doing it. She never hid herself."
"We have a friend that was a dairy farmer, and they were having all kinds of troubles with different regulations," she said. Clinton, she said, "showed up on the farm. She went through the barn. She took a tour of everything. It wasn't anything beneath her."