The contest to replace Jeff Sessions in the United States Senate at last ended on Tuesday when Alabamians, to the immense relief of decent people everywhere, elected to send Doug Jones to Washington instead of lifelong bigot and alleged child predator Roy Moore. Sure, it's not great that Jones bested Moore by only a few percentage points, but in a state like Alabama, where the modern Democratic Party hasn't been competitive in a generation, the reality is that it is far more difficult for a Democrat to overcome a seemingly-insurmountable partisan barrier than it is for a Republican to clear a seemingly-insurmountable moral one.

Since every off-cycle election in this country gets treated as a sort of mini-referendum on the party in power—there's a reason you hear a lot about Virginia's gubernatorial contest every four years—the speculation about what Jones' victory signals for the 2018 midterms was underway before the networks even called the race late on Election Night. And some prominent Democratic voices, fresh off their unexpected success in deep-red-of-deepest-red Trump territory, are thinking hard about a certain Texas politician whose job they'd most like to snatch.

At first glance, this sentiment seems to be more of a naïve, aspirational one. It's been more than four decades since a Democratic presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, took home Texas' electoral votes, and that win came in the aftermath of Richard Nixon's scandal-plagued Republican administration. It's been more than two decades since a Democrat won a statewide election of any kind. “The party is organizationally bereft here,” says Jim Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin. “They start from a fundamentally low baseline and are relatively resource-poor, especially compared to an ascendant—if not hegemonic—Republican Party.” The GOP's uninterrupted dominance has pushed the state's political discourse so far to the right that it has become just about impossible for even moderate Republicans, let alone Democrats, to have a viable shot at elected office.

A (Slightly) Bluer Texas

There are hints that Texas might not be quite as strong of a stronghold as GOP officials tallying up seats in their heads might assume, though. Four years after Mitt Romney bested President Obama in Texas by a solid 16-point margin, Hillary Clinton nearly halved that spread, losing to Donald Trump by just over nine points. The narrowing of this gap can be explained, in part, by the fact that Texas is in the midst of a massive (and oft-discussed) demographic shift in which the Hispanic population is expected to eclipse the white population, probably sometime in the next few years. The people who comprise this new plurality will also be significantly younger, on the whole, than their white counterparts. Slowly, the home of the last two Republican presidents is starting to look like the type of state where Democratic candidates do quite well.

The changing ethnic composition of the electorate isn't the only reason Texas might be tinting purple. "As the Hispanic population grows, the GOP will become more dependent on getting very high levels of support among whites," explains Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton University. "But that population in Texas is more educated and more moderate that it is in Alabama, so Texas Republicans have to worry much more about the suburban swings that decided the recent Virginia elections, too." After years of staking the furthest-right positions on just about every issue, the potential emergence of an empowered centrist coalition could pose an existential threat to the Republican Party's control of state politics. A Democratic chief of staff who is closely monitoring the Texas election echoed this sentiment. “The results in Alabama don’t disprove years of statewide conservative dominance in Texas," he said. "But the coalition in Texas that could beat Cruz will look a lot more like the successful Virginia and Alabama coalitions than he might like."

Lessons from Alabama

Demographic trends don't guarantee splashy ballot box victories. But Alabama provides some tantalizing clues about how the Democratic party can, at the very least, maximize its chances of success. Of all the factors that contributed to Jones' win, the historic turnout levels among African-American voters—the result of a sustained get-out-the-vote effort spearheaded by the state chapter of the NAACP, among other groups—is the most significant. More black Alabamians voted in this election than in either of President Obama's wins, and 96 percent of them backed Jones. It turns out that straining to convince Republican voters to switch their allegiances is a far worse use of time and energy than getting existing supporters to the polls on Election Day. (This is, as many have pointed out, a lesson that a Democratic Party perpetually chasing the elusive white working-class vote probably should have learned some time ago. But as the old saying goes, what's done is done, and the president is the president.)