Beth Clayton believes that she saw her home state's political future in the exit polls from the Dec. 12 Senate election. And it's not an Alabama that anyone has known lately.

"We have a lot of young people in this state who are not hung up on those social issues that tie up our grandparents and parents," said Clayton, national committeewoman with the Young Democrats of Alabama. "Those don't matter to young people who are struggling to pay off student debt, and buy a house and start a family."

If the biggest surprise on Dec. 12 was Doug Jones beating Roy Moore, the second-biggest might be the following: According to exit polling, voters under age 40 backed the Democrat by margins that the political world would label as astronomical.

For example, Alabama voters ages 25 to 29 favored Jones over Moore by 27 percentage points. That margin ballooned to 34 percentage points among voters 30 to 39. As the voters' ages increased further, the pendulum swung toward Moore, and the turnout grew. But it wasn't enough to close the gap.

These numbers, circulating around the state, intrigue longtime observers who study and analyze Alabama politics, history and culture. In interviews, they express a sense that Dec. 12 could prove to be a foretelling of things to come, of deep-red Alabama taking on the color purple, becoming less reliably Republican and veering away from hardline social conservatism.

The change, they say, is unlikely to happen in 2018, when the ballot is crowded with statewide races and the GOP's long-established support from business coalitions returns in force. But it's out there, they say, an Alabama that's perhaps on its way to being a Deep South political bellwether.

"Alabama's young voters, I don't think they consider themselves aligned with any party. They may lean Republican because their parents may have been, but they are not red or blue. You cannot categorize them," said Steve Flowers, a former Republican member of the Legislature who now writes a political column published in more than 60 newspapers.

Flowers said, "There is what I would consider a purple gleam to that voter that looks more like the 20- to 40-year-old in Ohio or California."

Overanalyzed or accurate?

Jones' win ended a decade-long losing streak for Democrats in statewide elections. It also marked the first time that a Democrat won a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama in a quarter-century.

The Jones campaign has been credited with running a well-organized get-out-the-vote campaign, assisted by national Democrats with a rare infusion of political cash for an Alabama race. A black voter surge, political observers note, was instrumental in the outcome and underscored what should be a Democratic focus going into the 2018 midterms.

But there are also those who dismiss the Senate outcome as nothing more than an aberration. To them, Moore was a terribly flawed candidate, twice booted from his job as state chief justice, strident in his rhetoric and, in the final weeks of the campaign, besieged by allegations that he'd sexually prowled Gadsden for teenage girls while he was a lawyer in his 30s.

"At the end of the day, he was killed by the allegations," said Jonathan Gray, a Republican political strategist based in coastal Alabama.

The Dec. 12 exit polling opens its own window into what might have been on voters' minds that Tuesday.

Widely cited by four major TV networks -- CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS -- the polling was conducted by Edison Research on behalf of the so-called National Election Pool. The Associated Press departed from the pool, and Fox News abandoned it in favor of its "Fox News Voter Analysis."

The Associated Press is experimenting with alternatives to traditional exit polls, which came under criticism during the 2016 presidential election, and, most prominently, in the 2000 election presidential election won by George W. Bush.

"Our most recent experiment was in Alabama," said Lauren Easton, spokeswoman with the AP, referring to the Dec. 12 special election. "We are analyzing the results and plan to share them publicly, as we have done with earlier polling experiments conducted over the years."

The Fox News Analysis, unlike the National Election Pool, asked voters which issues were the most important to them, what they thought about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and which football team that they pulled for: Alabama or Auburn. (For the record, the poll suggests that Tiger voters preferred Jones by 2 percentage points, and Tide voters sided with Moore by 6 percentage points.)

Voters polled by Fox network said that they were more concerned with the economy and health care than with race relations, immigration and gun policy or with social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. Health care voters overwhelmingly sided with Jones; economy voters gave majority support to Moore.

Richard Fording, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, who prior to the election crunched his own numbers, said the overall exit poll data confirmed his suspicions that the heyday of social issues is fading.

"I think the real hardcore Christian conservatives are still there and the exit polls show they overwhelmingly supported Roy Moore," Fording said. "But it seems, as a share of the electorate, that group is shrinking."

He said, "Certainly, the brand of conservatism that Roy Moore represented isn't going to fly in a statewide election anymore here. The younger voters don't share those values."

Millennial force

Indicators of the youth wave for Jones were present ahead of Dec. 12. Perhaps most telling was dissension that broke out in the state GOP's youth corps. The Alabama Young Republicans, wary of Moore's social conservative platform, splintered away from the state party, and suspended its support of the nominee. More splintering followed: The Shoals Young Republicans in north Alabama and the Baldwin County Young Republicans in coastal Alabama made an end run on the state Young Republicans to pledge support for Moore.

Jess Brown, who, in his many years as a political science professor at Athens State University saw plenty of campaigns and causes come and go, said that state Republicans are clearly under pressure to adapt to changing times.

"The social conservative agenda, which is the core agenda for Roy Moore, is simply not going to resonate with the Millennials," Brown said. "I don't care if we're talking about Alabama or Kansas. What they've been riding on in the South and the Midwest, is not going to play well with them."

Said William Stewart, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Alabama: "Young people are 'liberal' when it comes to most social issues and when they settle down and begin taking active roles in politics, they will help redirect Republicans generally."

But what if Alabama's young voters -- white as well as black -- become accustomed to voting for Democrats?

The Pew Research Center, in an analysis in March, found that Millennials (ages 35 and under) joined the Gen-Xers (ages 36 to 51) as the country's most Democratic generations. By contrast, Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70) identified more as conservative Republicans. In 2015 and 2016, the Baby Boom contingent had its highest number of self-described conservative Republicans since 2000.

Reflecting on the events of Dec. 12, and the youth vote, Wayne Flynt, a renowned Alabama historian and professor emeritus in the History Department at Auburn University, was reminded of a political axiom that's been around for years. In the case of the Senate election, it goes like this: If they voted for Jones on Dec. 12, and then vote for Democrats in subsequent elections, "the chances are overwhelming they will vote Democratic for all elections until they die," he said,

"For many of them, Doug Jones, that's their first vote," Flynt said. And if they vote against President Donald Trump in 2020, "that's two elections."

Flynt said he's already seen changes since the Jones win, and they hit close to home. In an interview with AL.com, he said his three goddaughters -- college graduates with diverse professional backgrounds from software design to pediatrics -- are considering future careers inside the state inspired by the outpouring of support for Jones, and Moore's defeat.

He said, "I don't think Alabama was in play for any of them until the Doug Jones election."

Flynt said he remains attuned to Auburn University, and noted that even politically conservative students turned off by Moore's far-right stances. Lee County, home of Auburn University, went for Jones by 17 percentage points 13 months after backing Trump in the 2016 presidential election by 22 points.

"It's not that they are advocates of same-sex marriage, but they know so many gay students at Auburn and they are rethinking all of that," Flynt said. "What they find really repulsive are theocrats like Roy Moore who want to make their personal beliefs enforced by law. That does not play well at all, even for conservative students."

Ohio or Virginia?

Flowers said that Alabama, on its present trajectory, could become more like Ohio - a presidential bellwether - in far-flung elections. He doesn't see much changing, however, in 2018. Nor does he buy into any message that Jones's victory is a precursor to an immediate "resurrection" of the Democratic Party in Alabama.

Flynt agrees, and said the high-income suburbs like Mountain Brook - which heavily supported Jones over Moore - are likely to revert to Republican candidates as the Business Council of Alabama exerts its muscle again after keeping a distance from Moore.

But Flynt recoils at any comparison between Alabama and Ohio or any of the presidential toss-up states in the industrialized Midwest such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.

He said Alabama's potential, in the aftermath of Jones's victory, is brighter than that as high-tech industries and new businesses pop up along the Interstate 85 from Montgomery toward Atlanta, or along Interstate 65 through Birmingham.

He said the state's employment base is more pluralistic, dominated by diverse demographics unseen in prior generations whose social conservatism dominated politics.

"I think the Business Council is going to change, and it realizes that the old corporate patterns that drove Alabama for more than a century of low wages and exploitative industries are not the wave of the future," Flynt said. "It's the way of the past and that's Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. To try and mimic Ohio and Michigan, with all their problems, seems to me to be the old way Alabama would've thought of itself."

The Senate election results, Flynt said, could represent a change in perspective to more high-growth and well-educated enclaves in the Virginia and Texas suburbs.

"Even places like Mobile and Montgomery and the organizations that are trying to change those cities are making progress," Flynt said. "They are making progress with blacks, Millennials, and are making progress with people who are coming from outside of Alabama."

"It's coming just as sure as a spring breeze can turn into a tornado," Flynt said about the political reshaping of Alabama. "It's just coming in at a different speed and at a different angle. When it comes, people are going to discover that Alabama is incredible, has low taxes and is one of the country's most beautiful states."