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Alison Lundergan Grimes campaigns with the former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton during a campaign rally at Northern Kentucky University on Saturday. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Around 1,200 people braved cold temperatures and northern Kentuckys first snowfall of the season on Saturday morning to see former secretary of state and presumptive 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton implore them to help elect Alison Lundergan Grimes to the US senate.

In the 7,000-person city of Highland Heights, thats an impressive turnout though, in an arena that seats almost 10,000, the two ralliers who expressed surprise at the small size of the crowd werent utterly mistaken either.

But, as Grimes pointed out to both the morning audience and an afternoon one at Transylvania University in Lexington, her opponent, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, allegedly has to pay people to show up to his rallies. (Later on Saturday, a fire marshal shut down the entrance to the 1,050-seat auditorium in Lexington shortly before Grimes and Clinton arrived, and several of those barred from the auditorium waited more than an hour in strong winds and temperatures barely above freezing to catch a glimpse of the two leaving.)

For a candidate whose latest polls showed her at a significant deficit, that 2,200 people turned out at the two campaign stops on a freezing cold Saturday was a good showing. Many of the attendees told the Guardian that they were there to see and show support for Grimes, not to simply get a glimpse at as Clinton was constantly referred to from the stage the next president of the United States.

Clinton, though, was not without her allure especially for a handful of attendees who werent Kentucky voters. In Highland Heights, Tasha Dennis, who was born in Kentucky but now teaches in Michigan, came with her sister. Ive always loved Hillary, she said, but hoped Grimes would be elected because theres not enough females in Congress. Christi Elliott, a local social worker attending the same rally with her 16-year-old daughter, said: I love Hillary. I love what she did with the health insurance. She actually started it. Elliott said she was voting for Grimes because she was tired of Mitch.

On stage, Grimess lead-ins included current Kentucky attorney general, Jack Conway, the former and only female governor Martha Layne Collins (who, judging by the standing ovations, remains very popular) and the sitting governor, Steve Bashear, all of whom worked the crowd up for the crescendo Grimes presented in her stump-speech-cum-Hillary-introduction.

Grimess speeches didnt lack for jabs at her opponent: they were peppered with references to McConnells June speech at a conference hosted by the Koch brothers in which he promised no more votes on raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment or student loan reforms and called the passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill the worst day of my political life and his comment in July that equal pay for women was actually preferential treatment. There were a couple of oblique references to the McConnell election violation notice mailers over which the campaign has filed suit.

McConnells seniority, Grimes said in the morning, might be worth something if he werent up for sale to the highest bidder. In the afternoon, she added to that: He wants a bigger office. I want you to get a bigger paycheck.

Grimess pointed on-stage attacks on McConnell, which were tempered with emotional appeals to her audiences that she cared more about them as Kentuckians than her opponent, struck the right note with crowds that were decidedly ready to, as one man shouted in Lexington, Ditch Mitch. Henrietta Graves said she came to the Highland Heights rally (and wore several anti-McConnell buttons) because It is so very important to see Alison beat Mitch. McConnell, she explained gets nothing done: hes an obstructionist and we need to keep the Democratic majority because the supreme court judges are the most important thing in our government, and Republican appointees of late are an anachronism.

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