As Democratic wins started piling up on election night in Virginia, you probably saw the names of a few key winners circulating in social media and the press. But while the victories of Virginia governor-elect Ralph Northam, and Danica Roem, the first transgender person to ever be elected to a state legislature, rightly resonated, one key to understanding Tuesday's significance could come from a Democrat who lost: Veronica Coleman.

When Ravi Gupta, an Obama campaign alum and co-founder of the progressive incubator The Arena, first got to know Coleman in September, she had precisely zero staff. To boost her bid for a seat in Virginia’s 84th district, The Arena fronted the money to provide three staffers to Coleman's campaign, which the nonpartisan Cook Political Report predicted would require a “tidal wave” to win. On Tuesday night, Coleman came up short—but still received 48 percent of the vote, in a race that was expected to be a blowout.

For Gupta, Coleman's loss indicates what he calls a “blue wave” washing over the country as much any one of the Democrats’ many wins, and he believes it sends a clear message to Democratic number crunchers heading into 2018: It's okay to take more risks.

“There are Veronica Colemans all over this country, who we cannot overlook,” Gupta says, noting that Democrats tend to cluster around candidates who look like sure bets. “If we had supported them a little bit more, maybe we would have gone over the edge in Virginia. It tells me we have an even bigger opportunity than people realize.”

Political targeting is a booming industry, in which party operatives and consultants scrutinize electorate data to maximize their chances of winning. In the run-up to election night in Virginia, momentum began to build around a few key races, with a hodgepodge of grassroots progressive groups devoting time and money to electing candidates like Roem, Elizabeth Guzman, and Jennifer Carroll Foy, all of whom were predicted to have a decent shot at winning. Groups like Flippable, which crowdfunds money for specific state house races, analyzed decades worth of historical election data, and narrowed the list down to five candidates it would support. The group anticipated anywhere from two to eight seats would flip from red to blue. Instead, Democrats flipped 14 seats and counting, pending a handful of recounts.

'It tells me we have an even bigger opportunity than people realize.' Ravi Gupta, The Arena

That landslide victory suggests to Catherine Vaughan, CEO of Flippable, that some ahistorical momentum is building within her party, which might warrant Democrats broadening their sights heading into 2018. "We think that we can go deeper, and potentially shift our focus to some of these states and seats that might have been riskier before," Vaughan says. "This allows us to play a little more on the offense."

This shift, Vaughan says, may require pulling back the lens a bit to look not only at the numbers in a given district, but momentum in the country as a whole. In some ways, that approach is not unlike that of President Trump's campaign in the 2016 presidential election. Just days before the election, Trump's team sent their candidate to Wisconsin and Michigan, despite neither state having gone for a Republican presidential candidate since at least 1988.

The move puzzled members of the press and pollsters alike. But according to Matt Oczkowski, who helped run Trump's data analytics team, the decision to target these Democratic strongholds stemmed from the campaign's belief that 2016 wasn't going to be like other years.

"Political gut intuition plus polling would tell you it’s a difficult state for a Republican to win, but we saw a massive increase in the Rust Belt with older, rural, white voters," Oczkowski says. "We took early votes and absentee ballot returns and said, 'This electorate is very different than what people think it is.' Our version had Wisconsin as a winnable state.'"