Democrats are getting their hopes up again over a special election in a red state. Alabama Republicans on Tuesday backed Senate candidate Roy Moore, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who believes in criminalizing homosexuality, barring Muslims from Congress, and many other vicious and hateful things, over the establishment pick, Senator Luther Strange. “Moore wouldn’t be the most radical figure ever to serve in the Senate,” Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy wrote, “but as a theocrat he has few peers.” His extremism has Democrats from Birmingham to Washington, D.C., wondering whether they might be able to pull off an upset in one of the most conservative states in the country, stealing a key Senate seat that until recently was occupied by right-wing Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The Associated Press reports that Democrats “see an opening, even if it’s a narrow one,” after nominating an Alabama lawyer of their own, former U.S. attorney Doug Jones. He’s most famous for winning convictions against Ku Klux Klan members who murdered four black girls in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963. “It’s a stark moral choice” between him and a lawless bigot like Moore, said Ben Wikler, Washington director for the progressive group MoveOn. “We see this race as a key crystallization of what the country should stand for and the kind of extremism the country should reject.” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez told Washington Post reporter David Weigel that he’s “never seen a clearer contrast between candidates.”

But even as MoveOn and other progressive groups like End Citizens United are throwing their weight behind Jones, national Democrats are taking a wait-and-see approach to investing resources in the race. “The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, tasked with defending 10 incumbent senators in states won by Trump last year, has monitored the Jones race and advised on staffing—but has not yet committed resources to the race,” the Post reported on Wednesday. “The DNC has done a bit more for Jones, sharing the latest voter file with his campaign and helping him add staff after the primary. Former vice president Joe Biden, who has known Jones since the 1990s and encouraged him to make a run, recorded a robo-call for his primary bid and plans to return to Alabama on Oct. 3 to stump for him. American Bridge, a progressive opposition research group, prepared a 21-page memo of research to help Jones and other Democrats target Moore.”

Thursday brought more signs of trepidation. One Democratic senator told Roll Call reporter Bridget Bowman that the party is approaching the race “skeptically.” They know it’s an uphill battle, and some worry that too much visible involvement by national party players could turn off voters in such a deep-red state. “We will each be tied to those [national party] platforms,” Moore campaign chairman Bill Armistead told Bowman. “I think it’s going to be something very clear to distinguish between conservative Republican Roy Moore and liberal Democrat Doug Jones.”

This raises a familiar conundrum for the Democratic Party as it tries to compete in conservative territory under President Donald Trump: Making it competitive will require heavy investment from outside Alabama, where the state party is weak. But that investment will further nationalize the campaign when Jones desperately needs to be seen as independent of the national party. “Outside of about ten states along the Acela Corridor and the West Coast, the Democratic brand is mostly lousy,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “It’s an unfortunate fact of political life that if you have a ‘D’ next to your name in most places in the country you will pay a price as a candidate.”