With a strong Senate candidate and an extremist Republican opponent, the party is wrestling with how much support to provide in the deep-red state.

By Graham Vyse @ NewRepublic.com, Sept. 29

Excerpt has my underlining, of what I think it a very interesting analytic point as to the current climate, seems to go for both parties in many cases:

[....] This raises a familiar conundrum for the Democratic Party as it tries to compete in conservative territory under President Donald Trump: Making it competitive will require heavy investment from outside Alabama, where the state party is weak. But that investment will further nationalize the campaign when Jones desperately needs to be seen as independent of the national party. “Outside of about ten states along the Acela Corridor and the West Coast, the Democratic brand is mostly lousy,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “It’s an unfortunate fact of political life that if you have a ‘D’ next to your name in most places in the country you will pay a price as a candidate.”

Kessler, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, acknowledged that this dynamic would hold whether or not Jones received support from the party, and yet he proposed that Jones “convince voters that he’s a different type of Democrat.” “If I were him I wouldn’t take Party money and I’d make a show of it,” Kessler said. “He should be able to raise enough money from grassroots support to finance his campaign anyway. The winner in any contested race is the candidate who seems most independent from their party.” [....]