Black women, a voting bloc the chairman of the Democratic National Committee called "the backbone" of the party, pulled the most weight in a coalition with women and young voters to carry Doug Jones to victory in last night's special election.

Jones won in large part to African-American turnout in a race where blacks represented a larger portion of turnout than when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Of the 30 percent of African Americans who cast a ballot, Jones won more than 90 percent of African-American men and 98 percent of African-American women, according to exit polling conducted by CNN.

"The African-American vote was a linchpin of Doug Jones's success here," Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said on a conference call Wednesday morning with reporters. "When I saw the early polling data, the exit polling data [Tuesday night] that showed 30 percent African American turnout, that was a sign that we had a real shot."

Jones, who as U.S. attorney put two Ku Klax Klan members responsible for the 16th Street Bombing behind bars, credited his personal story for his success with black voters on Tuesday.

"Folks know my history, it was not hard to get my history out," he said in an interview Wednesday.

Jones also performed well with women, besting Moore by 16 percentage points among female voters.

"Women carried the day for Doug in many respects, especially African-American women - the backbone of the Democratic Party," Perez said.

The Jones campaign spent considerable resources on reaching out to younger voters, with Jones zipping across the state to college campuses and tailgating on game days, and making access to an affordable college education a campaign talking point.

Roughly 35 percent of ballots were cast by voters between the ages of 18 and 44, with Jones winning six in 10 votes from voters between the ages of 18 and 29.

"He did incredibly well because his values reflected the values of the millennial generation," Perez said.

The national party invested close to $1 million on the race but operated behind the scenes, Perez said, because publicly announcing national involvement would have been detrimental to Moore in the state.

"We operated below the radar screen because that was in the best interest in this race," he said. "We were below the radar screen, but we were present, we were present throughout Alabama."

The DNC spent nearly all that $1 million on African American and millennial outreach, according to Perez. Most of the organizers were African Americans organizing in black communities. Minority-owned vendors were used for engagement and get out the vote efforts. Staff also went to college campuses and shuttle buses were provided for rides to the polls from college campuses "because we knew that Doug's message would resonate with millennial voters," he said.

The party also had remote texting banks and a volunteer recruitment email operation that sent more than 1 million texts to predominantly black voters. Hundreds of thousands of cell phone numbers were purchased to reach millennials and African Americans.

The stars also aligned for Jones in ways out of his control. The former U.S. attorney was running against a flawed Republican candidate in former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who was dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct by women at the time they were teenagers and he was an assistant district attorney in his 30s. The accusations, which first surfaced in early December, led Richard Shelby, Alabama's Republican senior senator, to cast a write-in vote for a "distinguished Republican" and went on national television on Sunday to slam Moore.

Whether influenced by Shelby or not, there were more than 22,000 write-in votes cast - larger than Jones's 20,000 vote margin of victory against Moore.

"I think it helped, obviously. I don't want to underestimate the influence of Sen. Shelby. He has been a leader in the state for decades ... but at the same time I don't know what the final write-in tally was," Jones said in an interview Wednesday. "I told him that I felt like what he did was courageous for Alabama. I think he put his state above party even though he wrote-in a Republican. We felt it was important that folks knew that he was rejecting the kind of politics of Roy Moore."

The Jones campaign also had success in red counties carried by Trump. Perez singled out Lee County, named after Robert E. Lee, where Trump won by 24 points but Jones carried by 17 points over Moore. The last Democratic presidential candidate to break 50 percent in Lee County since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.

"You look at Doug's 67-county strategy and it paid off," Perez said, pointing to Jones winning Madison County in Huntsville and throughout the Black Belt.

Above all, according to Perez, Jones's campaign message transcended party politics.

"He won because his values are the values of Alabama and frankly the American people. Those are Democratic values," Perez said. Jones is "a uniter, he brings people together. That's what Alabamians want."