Kentucky Democrats took a shellacking in November, as voters dashed any potential hope the beleaguered party had wanted to take out of the 2020 election cycle.

President-elect Joe Biden lost all but two of the states 120 counties on his way to a 27-point loss to President Donald Trump . Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cruised to a 20-point victory over Democratic candidate Amy McGrath, the second-largest margin of his 36-year Senate career. The GOP expanded its supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Democrats barely register in the state now: Gov. Andy Beshear is the only Democratic officeholder statewide, and Rep. John Yarmuth is alone in its Republican-heavy Washington delegation.

Kentucky is not the place to go looking for Democratic enthusiasm. Rather, it seems like every challenge the party faces has coalesced there at once: a base increasingly concentrated in major metro areas; a struggle to reach rural and working-class white voters; atrophied party infrastructure; and intra-party disputes over its direction that have left Democrats without a coherent message on the economy, racial justice, the environment or anything else.

To state Rep. Charles Booker, who narrowly lost the Democratic Senate primary to McGrath in June, that also makes Kentucky the perfect laboratory in which to rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up.

Just because someone is terrible and everyone knows how terrible Mitch McConnell is that isnt enough to overcome generations of people feeling left behind, feeling like nothing will ever change, being very directly disenfranchised, Booker told HuffPost earlier this month. [McConnells victory] was shocking to a lot of folks nationally, but the truth is, if people still feel like no ones listening to them, and then nothing matters, then how do you expect things to dramatically change?

This is a moment to not turn away from places like Kentucky, but to actually invest more on the ground, he said. And not just in candidates, not just around election time, but in people, year-round. There is no substitute for that type of work.