BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Destiny Clark, a transgender woman and Alabama native, couldn’t bear the thought of going to Doug Jones’s election night party and being there when he lost.

So instead, she watched the unimaginable unfold Tuesday night at home, in front of the TV. “It was amazing,’’ she said, recalling the moment when Jones pulled ahead of Roy S. Moore in the Senate race, and stayed there.

“Like, I jumped for joy, and my dogs looked at me like I was crazy. Tears of joy were running down my face.’’

But by week’s end, the ecstatic moment had faded to a more tempered, pragmatic view of the future of progressives, Democrats, and others usually left on the sidelines in one of the nation’s most conservative states.

“It can happen,’’ Clark, 33, the president of the rights group Central Alabama Pride, said of a Democratic resurgence. “It’s just going to take a lot of work.’’

Moore opposes abortion rights, speaks of “sodomy’’ as a plague on the national character, and has declared “the transgenders don’t have rights.’’ He is also an unabashed Islamophobe who has said America was great during slavery’s days.

So, for liberals in Alabama last week, the improbable victory of Jones, who favors abortion rights and gender equality, unleashed an explosion of joy that echoed the civil rights victories of the state’s past.

But it was leavened with an understanding that the win might have done little, for now, to change the beneath-the-underdog status of Democrats in a Deep South state still under near total Republican control.

“I don’t think we’re out dancing in the streets saying this is a totally new day,’’ said Jim Folsom Jr., who was Alabama governor from 1993 to 1995, when Democrats were near the end of their historic dominance of Alabama politics. “We’re all realistic enough to know that party identification leans heavily Republican and probably will for the foreseeable future.’’

Still, he said, Democrats have to start somewhere. “A lot of those more urban, moderate-leaning to liberal-leaning Republicans who voted Democratic,’’ he said, “now they’ve discovered they can do it, and the world didn’t come to an end.’’

It is a bittersweet place that Alabama liberals find themselves in as they watch the way Jones’s victory has given their compatriots around the country a sense of momentum.

They are well aware that Jones’s victory, by 1.5 percentage points, could be explained in part by the conservatives who stayed home because of Moore’s extremism, and by the allegations of improper relations with teenage girls that turned Moore from a deeply flawed candidate to a toxic one.

And they know the ad hoc coalition that supported Jones might be difficult to reproduce against the next opponent.

Catherine Ross of Mobile, who works in a retail store, was among those Republicans who voted for Jones because she thought Moore reinforced the state’s reputation for intolerance. She found it embarrassing.

“I’d watch the ‘Today’ show every morning and hear them talk about us,’’ said Ross, 46. “It’s like I wanted to yell, ‘We’re not like this!’ I don’t want people to come here and think they’d be offended. I want businesses to feel like they can come here.’’

But acknowledging those realities has not fully squelched the optimism that has surged among many of Jones’s supporters, many of them far from Alabama stereotypes.

Zeenat Islam, 21, a senior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, moved to Alabama from Pennsylvania in 2010. A Muslim of Pakistani heritage, Islam has experienced moments of discrimination here. But she mostly spoke about a place that was casually multicultural and surprisingly tolerant, even loving. That, she said, was the Alabama that won Tuesday night.

“It shows that the change is happening, the change I really want to see,’’ she said. “Before I moved here, I was so concerned that I was going to move to this really racist state: ‘Mom, what am I going to do?’ But I feel like this place has opened so many different doors. Southern hospitality, that’s really real. I love — love — it.’’

Bryant K. Oden, 37, said he viewed Jones’s victory as part of a larger narrative of healing and progress that he wanted to be a part of when he moved back to Alabama in 2010.

Oden, a radio producer and on-air personality, returned to his native state, one of the nation’s poorest, from the West Coast in 2010, inspired by then-president Barack Obama’s mantra, “We are the change we seek.’’ Oden has been volunteering in an after-school program to help teach students to write computer code.

Oden said the politics of the state, like his volunteer work, would not create overnight change. But Jones’s win had given him hope. “When you’re dealing with the bureaucracy of government, it never moves fast,’’ he said. “It’s about educating people about the process and continuing to have the long game in mind.’’

No one knows how long it might be, given the scope of Republican dominance here. Gallup ranks Alabama among the most conservative states in the nation. Republicans control all of Alabama’s other statewide offices and have occupied the governor’s mansion since 2003.