Bashear won by being pro-choice and pro-trans trans rights.
Pundits and Professional Democrats will marvel at this for day, and then many will forget by about it by next week.
Okay, that's unduly harsh, but the belief that voters are conservative on these issues, when in fact they can be mobilized on them, is very deep and hard to dislodge.
Yglesias expressed this view very well. It's simply rooted in the idea that The Left can't be right about anything, so they have to be at least a bit wrong!