A single question has loomed over Alabama politics since Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat, was elected to the United States Senate last December: Could the state’s long-beleaguered Democrats muster anything close to a repeat in November? Read more

The race for governor between Kay Ivey, the Republican incumbent, and Mayor Walt Maddox of Tuscaloosa, the Democratic nominee, will do much to settle the debate. But two other contests — the elections for attorney general, featuring the son of the state’s last Democratic governor, and for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court — will be seen as measures of how the parties will fare in the state in the near future.

When they argue that Mr. Jones’s victory was an exception, and not the dawning of a new Democratic era, the Republicans who control the Capitol in Montgomery point to Alabama’s conservative leanings and, more crucially, to the numbers. Republicans recorded far higher turnout than Democrats in the primaries over the summer, and last year, Mr. Jones defeated Roy S. Moore, among the most controversial Alabama politicians of the last century, by just 21,924 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast.

But Democrats, who last held the Governor’s Mansion in early 2003, have sensed a groundswell of energy and argued that Mr. Jones’s election persuaded independents and Democrats alike that the party could, in fact, win statewide in Alabama. And Democrats, to the worry of some Republicans, believe that they have fielded their strongest slate of candidates in years.