Clinton trips up in the Big Apple. New Yorkers can relate.

Clinton, attempting to use the subway. (Photo: Yana Paskova/Getty Images.)

Earlier this month, a little more than two weeks before New York’s Tuesday primary, Hillary Clinton decided to take the subway.

It did not go smoothly.

Attempting to go through a turnstile at the 161st Street station in the Bronx, the former secretary of state had to swipe her fare card no less than five times as camera phones flashed and one local seemed to grow impatient standing behind her. After cramming a posse of aides into an already crowded No. 4 train car for a one-stop trip, she then attempted to engage with a young woman in headphones who seemed categorically unimpressed.

Almost immediately, Clinton’s critics cited the incident as an example of how out of touch she was. “You can tell Hillary hasn’t done the subway in a while, since she’s talking to people,” Chuck Ross, a reporter at the Daily Caller, tweeted, acknowleding an unspoken rule of silence among New York commuters. Former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., offered an instructional video, swiping her MetroCard once and walking through a turnstile before declaring, “It’s just that easy, just that quick.”

But as Clinton hops around the state she once represented in the Senate and still calls home, her awkward encounters with some of its biggest institutions and most powerful inhabitants have also struck a chord of sympathy with New Yorkers. Turning up your nose at, say, a fried Oreo at the Iowa State fair is far worse than screwing up a subway swipe. The rules of campaigning morph from state to state. And in a city full of transplants, Clinton’s typically awkward interactions have come across as surprisingly charming reminders of what it means to survive the daily New York schlep. As the New York Times so elegantly judged the subway incident: “At least Mrs. Clinton tried.”

Clinton at Junior’s in Brooklyn. (Photo: Seth Wenig/AP.)

And try she has. Not long after her fight with the turnstile, the former New York senator visited Junior’s, a diner in downtown Brooklyn, where she and her entourage were presented with a choice of the iconic spot’s classics: pineapple or strawberry cheesecakes. She eyed the dense, creamy slices hungrily, but refused to take a bite. “I learned early on not to eat in front of all of you,” she said, addressing the massed ranks of camera operators around her. New Yorkers who would only ever eat Junior’s cheesecake alone in their kitchen with the blinds drawn could relate. The incident inspired a jokey BuzzFeed post titled “ Hillary Clinton vs. Cheesecake.” Jessica Roy, a news editor at New York magazine, shared one particularly painful image that showed Clinton pursing her lips, peering longingly at the strawberry slice. “Hillary has never been more relatable than she is in this pic,” she tweeted.

Perhaps the most engaging moment in Clinton’s city expedition came during a tour she took of a New York City Housing Authority property in East Harlem. As she walked through the Corsi Houses, a seniors-only building that has been plagued with mold and water damage, reporters snapped photos of her shocked expressions. Josh Robin, a reporter for news channel NY1, caught one particularly powerful moment as the presidential candidate gazed at a narrow kitchen the width of a hallway — an image that swiftly inspired memes on Twitter. Some of the reactions were along the predictable lines of “Woman who gives speeches for $225,000 sees how the rest of the world lives,” but others understood her horrified expression in the context of New York City apartment life.“That’s a classic ‘You pay $3,000 a month for this?’ face,” one follower observed, a response that was retweeted more than 450 times. Brett LoGiurato, a deputy editor at Business Insider, shared the photo, with the caption, “When your mom sees your NYC apartment for the first time.”

Like anyone’s visit to New York City, Senator Clinton’s has not been without its obvious lows. Even someone with a PR team as large hers, for instance, couldn’t avoid walking under the gray cloud of negative media coverage that follows New York Mayor Bill de Blasio around — especially after participating in an unfortunate skit that that involved a joke about “CP time” (colored-people time). And then there was that rally where Bill Clinton mocked Bernie Sanders’ supporters, joking at a Fort Washington event that the Vermont senator’s message was to “just shoot every third person on Wall Street and everything will be fine.” On Monday, she told reporters that she carries hot sauce in her bag, which is most likely just something she heard in a Beyoncé song. But hey, even the most successful Fifth Avenue resident sometimes steps in a pile of dog poop. A New York residency, however brief, is not complete without a little bit of abject failure.

However well or poorly she does in the primary election, at least a few people on Clinton’s campaign seem to have understood that looking vulnerable in the city can work to her advantage. Just a few days after Clinton’s run-in with the MTA, the error page for her website changed stealthily one night. “Trying to get where you want to go?” it read, below a GIF of Clinton swiping over and over again. “This page isn’t it.”