Last December, at the election-night watch party for Doug Jones in Birmingham, Alabama, LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright were among the last to arrive. The founders of the Black Voters Matter Fund had worked throughout 2017 to register and turn out rural voters in the state for the former U.S. attorney’s long-shot U.S. Senate bid against evangelical stalwart and accused child molester Roy Moore. They had moved souls to the polls until they closed, then met up in Birmingham to join their fellow activists and Democrats.

“The people in there were quiet, hushed, waiting for the final results,” Brown told me. “These being Alabama Democrats, nobody could actually believe their own eyes, believe that we were actually winning. It was still close when we got there. Then we saw on CNN that two counties were left, Hale and Dallas. People were biting their nails. But our group started celebrating, whooping it up. And an older white woman, wouldn’t you know, came over and told us to be quiet. She said, ‘No, hush, don’t celebrate, don’t jinx it!’ Well, we had literally just left Hale and Dallas counties. We said, ‘No, ma’am, we know what happened: We won.’ And of course, we did.”

What the lady didn’t know–what almost nobody realized—was how this seeming miracle, the biggest Democratic victory in Alabama since what felt like the Dawn of Time, had come about. The multiple allegations against Moore hadn’t tipped the election decisively in Jones’s favor; white Alabamians, including two-thirds of white women, had stuck with the Trump-endorsed Republican, who’d twice been booted from his job as state Supreme Court chief justice, most recently for defying federal law on same-sex marriage. But voters in predominantly black counties had shown up in numbers never before seen in non-presidential years. Black women—98 percent went for Jones—had made the ultimate difference.

The news was heartening but mystifying to Democrats outside the South, many of whom have long tended to view Alabama—like the rest of the South—as one big, unbroken expanse of incorrigible white racists, both a source and a symbol of everything ugly and backward about America. For decades, this stereotype dictated Democrats’ approach to the South. You couldn’t win statewide down there, the consultants said, without running white moderates adept at speaking the language of white conservatism.

To garner party support for a run in the South, Democrats distanced themselves from liberal ideas and black voters. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter was Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992, in which he famously lambasted an “anti-white” rapper in an attempt to reinforce his appeal to conservative whites. This came not long after he’d made a show of returning to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled black man. Democrats could only win below the Mason-Dixon, the thinking went, by pandering to white “swing” voters.