Over the weekend, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum bowed out of their races in Georgia and Florida, respectively. Gillum, standing next to his wife, congratulated governor-elect Ron DeSantis before speaking directly to disappointed supporters. "We want you to know that we see you, and we hear you, and that your voices will continue to power us as we still stand on the front lines right alongside you to make this a state that works for all of us," he said. Gillum also promised not to bow out of politics altogether: "This fight for Florida continues, and I just want to thank you all for being along with us for at least this part of the journey. But the journey continues."

A few hundred miles north, Abrams was a little less conciliatory—not a huge surprise, given that her opponent, outgoing secretary of state Brian Kemp, eked out the victory while presiding over an astonishingly brazen scheme of voter disenfranchisement—but not less hopeful. "The title of governor isn’t nearly as important as our shared title: voters," she said. "And this is why we fight on." Abrams wrapped by announcing the launch of "Fair Fight Georgia," an organization that will work to ensure greater transparency in the administration of future elections in the state.

For Democrats, these losses, along with Beto O'Rourke's in Texas, sting for a similar set of reasons: Each candidate is an exciting and inspiring politician in whom voters made real emotional investments. They all ran as as staunch progressives in races in which Democrats typically put up vanilla centrists who get shellacked on Election Day, and all they hoped to defeat particularly odious Republican opponents, and came much closer to doing so than pundits expected. Even one win here would have been an extra-satisfying exclamation point to a wave election, and sent a strong signal that good things are in store for Democrats in reddish-purple states. Coming up short in all three races feels a little more demoralizing than losing any three randomly-selected races probably should.

There are still reasons to be hopeful. Gillum, Abrams, and O'Rourke succeeded in prompting the type and scale of engagement that Democratic strategists know they need to win in reddish-purple states, but that had, until now, largely eluded them. In Georgia, early voting alone approached the total number of people who voted in the last midterm election, and many Texas counties needed only a few days to surpass their 2014 numbers. In Florida, midterm turnout usually hovers around 50 percent. This time around, nearly two-thirds of eligible voters showed up to cast a ballot. None of this is coincidence.

The challenge for politicians who are not Abrams, Gillum, or O'Rourke will be keeping this surge of voters engaged, which is by no means guaranteed. But these candidates built the all-important infrastructure that will allow future Democrats to connect with people who have been unable to or uninterested in participating in the democratic process—and to chip away at the built-in partisan advantage on which Republican power in these states depends. The 2018 election, as Gillum put it, was not just about who gets to be Florida's next governor; it was about "creating the kind of change in this state that really allows for the voices of everyday people to show up again in our government and in our state and in our communities." The fact that this change occurs incrementally does not mean that it does not occur.