No one was more elated about the Democrats’ stunning victories in Virginia last week than Carolyn Fiddler. The political editor at Daily Kos, a progressive blog community, she grew up in the tiny town of Warsaw in Richmond County and got her first taste of politics as a college intern for the state House Democratic Caucus. Fiddler has served as the state party’s deputy finance director and communications chief, though never under ideal circumstances. For all the talk of Virginia’s increasingly blue hue, Republicans have controlled the House of Delegates for her entire political career.

Last Tuesday may have changed all that. A Democratic wave washed over Old Dominion and wrested at least 15 House seats away from the GOP, throwing control of the chamber into question; several races are under recount, with Democrats just one seat away from a 50-50 split of the chamber. Fiddler, who predicted her party would flip no more than eight seats, told me she was “overcome with abject joy” as the results rolled in. Political analysts Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, wrote at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, “The Democratic gains in the Virginia House of Delegates were nothing short of extraordinary. Even the most bullish Democrats would have been thrilled with a low double-digit gain.”

These victories didn’t come in a vacuum. Washington state Democrats won a key state Senate race to capture control of the entire legislature, and the party picked up a number of seats across the country earlier this year. Now, Democrats are looking to next year’s midterm elections, when state legislative races and congressional elections coincide. After neglecting the states under President Barack Obama, the party controls just 31 of the nation’s 99 legislative bodies, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. “But faced with a historically low level of control of state legislatures, and with congressional redistricting in 2020 at stake, the party’s leaders, well-heeled contributors, and strategists are vowing to mount a never-before-seen effort to win these state-level battles,” Roll Call reported in January.

While Virginia has given Democrats hope for 2018, replicating its success across the country will require the party to overcome the following challenges—none of which is insurmountable.

Jessica Post, the executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, argued in an interview last month that “the first wall of resistance against Trump is in the states.” Acknowledging Democratic ineptitude in state politics through the Obama years, Post told Soledad O’Brien, “We thought that if we invested in the presidency, if we spent more money on paid communications, all of that would simply trickle down and legislative candidates would get elected. The reality is all of these candidates need to run their own campaigns with shoe leather, smart digital engagement, and better funding to get their own messages out. They can’t just run under the banner of the national presidential campaign, which I think was a longtime assumption.”