In boxing, it is said that styles make fights—that each fighter’s predispositions determine the flow of action in the ring. If the first debate between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke, in the Texas campaign for the U.S. Senate, can be taken as a representative example, the adage also applies to politics. For fifty-eight minutes on Friday evening, at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, the two men appeared as a contrast not just in political styles—unabashed partisanship against yearning ecumenism—but also in personality and character. The competition between O’Rourke, a congressman from El Paso, and Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, pits progressive idealism and a nearly Tom Hanksian earnestness against unctuousness and the kind of fearful Tea Party recriminations that paved Cruz’s path to the Senate, in 2012. The match would have seemed an intriguing if isolated exercise in political pugilism were it not for the implications of the Texas race for control of the Senate and, therefore, the composition of the Supreme Court, and, perhaps, the future of the Robert Mueller investigation. Cruz is a seasoned, talented debater and, at points in the discussions of immigration and law enforcement, he appeared more relaxed and composed than O’Rourke. Neither candidate seriously damaged the other, though, and, if either of them won, it was by a split decision.

Yet the fact that one of the most recognizably conservative figures in American politics came out somewhere near even—both in the polls and in debate performance—against a progressive Democrat, in Texas, is nearly as important as the scorecards themselves. No Democrat has held statewide office in Texas since 1994. Although Cruz has maintained a lead in the polls, on Friday the Cook Political Report moved the contest into its “Toss Up” category. The two candidates are pursuing the same seat, but winning it requires dissimilar achievements. Cruz, like other Republicans statewide, benefits from the generally Republican electorate. The progressive dream of turning Texas blue has long centered on the large numbers of Democratic-leaning voters who are either unregistered or don’t show up to the polls. (Texas ranks dead last among U.S. states in voter participation.) Moreover, Cruz’s predicament is in many ways a precise metaphor for the position that the Republican Party finds itself in under Donald Trump.

Midterm elections are typically a referendum on the party that controls the White House, but Trump is more popular than many Republicans in their home districts or states. Cruz himself is in the position of running against political headwinds with no real option for distancing himself from a polarizing President—in fact, he has asked Trump to campaign with him, despite the fact that Trump crudely insulted both his wife and his father during the 2016 Presidential campaign. The senator described his subsequent rapprochement with the President as an act of maturity—he was putting the good of the people of Texas ahead of his own hurt feelings. (It is never a good sign when a candidate is asked, as Cruz was during the debate, to respond to people who believe that he has lost his dignity.) When O’Rourke, hoping to counter Cruz’s depiction of him as an impeachment-friendly radical, said that he would “work with the President where we can, and stand up to him where we must,” Cruz chuckled. He is the one, he later pointed out, with a working relationship with Donald Trump.

On the subject of immigration, when O’Rourke argued for a path to citizenship for Dreamers, Cruz countered that American citizens “are dreamers, too.” And so it went: where O’Rourke spoke aspirationally, Cruz responded cynically. When O’Rourke spoke about background checks for gun ownership, Cruz stated that the Second Amendment was under attack. When O’Rourke was asked to state something that he admired about his opponent, he complimented Cruz’s commitment to his family and to his beliefs; Cruz returned the sentiment, then called O’Rourke a socialist like Bernie Sanders. Earlier, Cruz had accused O’Rourke of turning people against the police by supporting the right of N.F.L. players to protest during the national anthem, and said that Martin Luther King, Jr., would not have supported such actions. That statement prompted Bernice King to tweet that, in fact, her father would have challenged people who are “more dedicated to order than to justice.”

Three hours before the start of the debate, Cruz tweeted a video of O’Rourke speaking at the historic African-American Good Street Baptist Church, in Dallas, about Botham Jean, a twenty-six-year-old black man who was fatally shot inside his apartment, in Dallas, earlier this month by Amber Guyger, a thirty-year-old white police officer, who said that she had mistaken his apartment for her own, and thought he was a burglar. (She lives on the floor below Jean’s.) O’Rourke brought the congregation to its feet when, in a call for justice, he denounced the fact that, in lieu of real information about the shooting, the public had been informed only that, after a search warrant was issued, a small amount of marijuana had been found in Jean’s kitchen. The logic of Cruz’s tweet was curious—no one would reasonably attack a candidate for opposing the shooting of unarmed citizens in their own homes. A caption added to the video, however, elucidates the thinking. It reads, “O’Rourke asked ‘How can it be that in this country we continue to lose the lives of unarmed black men in the United States of America at the hands of white police officers?’ ” The campaign was apparently betting on voters who would be so offended by O’Rourke’s mentioning Guyger’s race that they would overlook the fact that he was powerfully raising crucial questions about the killing of a citizen who was minding his business at home. The incident unintentionally highlighted another difference between the candidates: one sees a path to victory in broadening the sense of possibility among the public and expanding the electorate; the other is attempting to win even if it means pandering to the base concerns of the one he already has. Cruz’s electoral advantages have dwindled as the election approaches. Six weeks ahead of the election, another truism of boxing applies: upsets are born when long shots stay close into the late rounds.