On a night in which flipped seats and razor-thin contests are getting most of the attention, it’s worth pausing to look at how the “blue wave” could have trickled down to one of the least-blue places in America, even though it ultimately didn’t. Alabama is by most measures one of the reddest states in the union. In 2010, Republicans drew the congressional map so that one of its seven districts is strongly black; that district now includes so many Democratic voters that Republicans have not put up a challenger to incumbent Terri Sewell since 2012. The state’s other six districts are almost as disproportionately Republican, and Democrats have often not bothered to mount serious campaigns there.

This year, however, Democrats found competitive, serious candidates for several deep-red districts in Alabama. Mallory Hagan, a 29-year-old former Miss America and TV reporter, struggled with fundraising in the 3rd District but earned national press and ran a serious campaign. Democrat Peter Joffrion occasionally outraised incumbent Mo Brooks in the 5th District. In the 2nd District, which I reported on this fall for the New York Times Magazine, Tabitha Isner, an ordained minister with a master’s degree in public policy, mounted an energetic race against incumbent Rep. Martha Roby. The 2016 Democratic candidate in the district was a peanut farmer who didn’t even have a “donate” button on his website.

If there was a sense locally that things might be different this year in Alabama, that was thanks in part to the victory of Democrat Doug Jones last year in the Senate special election against Roy Moore. During the campaign, Moore was credibly accused of sexual misconduct involving multiple teenage girls when he was a thirtysomething district attorney. He lost by fewer than 21,000 votes. But he still lost, which energized progressive organizers across the state. “What the Doug Jones race taught a lot of people in Alabama was that they’re not alone,” Hagan told me over the summer. “There are a lot of people who think like us, and it’s possible for our state to change.”

But not tonight. Hagan, Joffrion, Isner, and the other Democratic challengers in Alabama all lost in their attempts to unseat Republican incumbents. Democrat Walt Maddox lost to incumbent Republican Kay Ivey in the governor’s race, too. As of very early Wednesday morning, voters looked likely to approve an anti-abortion ballot measure that would change the state Constitution to “recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life,” effectively granting constitutional personhood to fetuses. Sewell will remain the state’s only Democrat in Congress.

From outside Alabama, this was not a surprise: None of the races attracted serious outside funding or attention. But from inside the state, victory wasn’t necessarily the point. Even if the change isn’t visible on the map, Democrats here have built new organizations, trained new volunteers, and mobilized new voters—and candidates. “We have to invest in people and not just races,” Doug Jones, who will have his own steep climb to re-election in 2020, told me last month. “We’ve got to play long ball. We should be putting resources here. We may not win, but we’ll make it close, we’ll make it competitive … and for the next cycle, things will be different.”