HOPKINSVILLE, Kentucky The confetti had barely hit the floor at Andy Beshears election night party on Tuesday when Democrats began proclaiming that his apparent defeat of unpopular GOP Gov. Matt Bevin should terrify Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell .

Mitch McConnell did not go to bed happy last night, Kentucky state Senate Minority Leader Morgan McGarvey said of the top U.S. Senate Republican, who hopes to win a seventh term in Washington a year from now.

All I have to say is: Mitch, youre next, Amy McGrath, the retired Marine pilot who is running as a Democrat against McConnell , wrote in a fundraising email sent out just an hour after Beshear declared victory.

Republicans in the state declared McConnell safe as hes ever been. Kentucky voters hadnt rejected the GOP, they insisted, but the bad apple in Bevin. The GOP won every other race on the ballot Tuesday night, even one for attorney general, an office no Republican has held since 1948.

The dueling reactions in Kentucky mirrored the national mood. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee saw it as proof that Democrats are ready to compete everywhere and win tough races in 2020, while Texas Sen. John Cornyn shrugged Beshears victory off as unrelated to national politics. Pundits on deadline saw the result as either a sign that McConnell should worry, or a total anomaly for a Democratic Party with no future in a deep red state.

Both sides may be too sure of themselves.

McConnell is deeply unpopular in the Bluegrass, just as Bevin was the same poll that considered Bevin the least popular GOP governor in the nation ranks McConnell as the lowest-rated member of the Senate. But these days, the overwhelming majority of Senate races are won by the same party the state voted for in the last presidential election Kentuckians chose Trump by 30 points in 2016, and will almost certainly vote for him again. No Senate majority leader, meanwhile, has lost a bid for reelection since 1952. And Kentucky has been trending steadily more Republican over the three decades of McConnells career its last Democratic senator was reelected in 1992, and it hasnt voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.

Beshears victory also may not be as big of an anomaly as Republicans hope. The tone of conversations, both public and private, with Kentucky Democrats and activists changed after Tuesday: the nervy, almost forced optimism that barely masked a bleak outlook for the future found itself replaced by something close to real hope. While winning in Kentucky is still a long, uphill battle that requires nigh-perfect circumstances, they at least had proof of concept now. Beshear drew a map of Kentucky that, at least in the cities and suburbs, appeared similar to those of other states in the Trump era. And he did it all as an unapologetic Democrat.

This is the first time a modern Democrat beat a modern Republican in Kentucky, said Dave Contarino, the executive director of Kentucky Family Values, a political action committee supported primarily by teachers and other labor unions. This wasnt some old-line, southern conservative Democrat. This was a pro-choice, pro-labor Democrat. I dont want to overstate it, but it may suggest that were not as far off as some people think we are.

Democrats probably wont win a Senate seat next year. But a high-profile Senate race could further rejuvenate a party trying to prove its still alive.

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On the drive down Highway 68 near the Tennessee border, a hulking obelisk rises into the sunny sky to commemorate Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president who was born there in 1808. The monument went up a century later, during the Lost Cause years. Its cast a shadow over Hopkinsville, one of the states Blackest cities, ever since.

Theres a pretty strong conventional wisdom in Kentucky politics that for Democrats, beating McConnell or any other statewide candidate would require running up huge margins in Louisville, Lexington and, as U.S. Rep John Yarmuth, a Louisville Democrat, told me this summer , the few other pockets of the state where there are lots of Democrats.

The people whove looked at it here have said, A Democrat can win statewide, but it has to be a very surgical race, Yarmuth said. And what they would say is, You have to know exactly where your voters are, and you dont waste any time on persuadables. You need to persuade the ones you know are going to vote for you [to] vote.