In that race, Republican Roy Moore is running not only against Jones, but against a mountain of allegations of sexual assault and harassment of several teenagers. According to the most recent Washington Post-Schar School poll, with renewed support from the national GOP, a presidential endorsement, and a powerful state machine behind him, Moore is keeping the race close, still only three points behind Doug Jones. A collection of other smaller polls actually show Moore pulling ahead in the last week. For Jones to win with such thin margins, he’ll need to turn out black voters. But doing so will mean confronting the state’s fraught history of voter suppression.

Part of the story of the Alabama special election is how resilient Moore has been with white voters. The Washington Post-Schar School poll shows him retaining the support of 63 percent of likely white voters in the state, including 57 percent of white women. While these numbers show that the onslaught of allegations of crimes against women have hurt him somewhat—recently, Republican presidential candidates in the state have garnered upwards of 70 percent of the white electorate—they also show that there appears to be nothing that can entirely stop the dominance of any GOP candidate with white Alabamians.

Jones’s path to victory is less complicated than before, but it still relies on the same dynamics as any Democrat in Alabama. As headline after headline attests, he’ll likely have to see decent turnout among the 26 percent of voting-age citizens who are black, and who largely live in the “black belt” of counties spanning the width of Alabama through the east and west of Montgomery.

That’s easier said than done. While Alabama did have the fifth-highest black turnout of any state in the 2014 midterm elections, it’s well-known that black turnout in midterms is much lower generally than it is in presidential elections. And while special elections vary widely in terms of turnout and racial dynamics, according to The New York Times, the Alabama secretary of state’s office estimates that only about a million people overall will vote in Tuesday’s election. That would be good for a paltry 26 percent overall, predictions that would follow an incredibly low 14 percent turnout for the Republican primary run-off, and speak to the general level of interest in the special election. They probably don’t bode well for making big gains among black voters.

Recent nationwide trends don’t really bode well for Jones’s chances of getting black voters to the polls in Alabama either. While the Obama years saw strong returns of black turnout—and thus black electoral power—in the 2016 election, black turnout dropped for the first time in 20 years, effectively ending the strength of the “Obama coalition” in the process. While some of this drop-off has been attributed to disinterest, and some of it is certainly simply mean-reversion after the anomalous appeal of Barack Obama, the fact that black turnout dipped below even 2004 levels, and that the decline was especially steep among men, might indicate some other forces at work.