Moreover, Davis’s path to victory, though achievable, requires Olympian dexterity. It’s in fact the only route for Democrats in solidly Republican states, one that Mike Ross of Arkansas and Vincent Sheheen of South Carolina are expected to follow in their quests for governor, and one that Hillary Rodham Clinton will surely pursue as well if she runs for president in 2016: Fire up young voters, persuade suburban women, register and turn out every minority in sight. Doing all of this at once presents a communications conundrum. How, for example, does Davis differentiate herself from Obama to swing voters in the suburbs without offending his supporters in urban areas? “We have a challenge,” one of her senior advisers told me, “because we have maybe five audiences: young Anglos, base Hispanics, persuadable Hispanics who’ve been here several generations, African-Americans and Anglo women. And you can’t have five messages. You have to have one.”

That message won’t be abortion rights. In fact, Davis will have to counter the caricatures of herself as a radical feminist and liberal icon and instead sell herself to Texans as one of them. Even that will constitute an uphill effort. As Davis’s campaign manager, Karin Johanson, observed to me two days before the Dallas Morning News article ran: “They’ll try to take her story away from her. But the story grounds her here.”

Last September, J. D. Angle showed up at the Fort Worth residence of Jeff Davis, the candidate’s ex-husband. The two men have been friendly for two decades, and Angle often dropped by the home when both Davises lived in it. On this occasion, Angle, who has worked with Wendy Davis since her first City Council race in 1996, brought cheese and wine in the manner of a supplicant. He mentioned a recent article about Wendy Davis written by Peggy Fikac, a Houston Chronicle reporter, who had interviewed Jeff Davis. Davis had been measured in his remarks while nonetheless making clear his financial contribution to his wife’s success. Though the article, published a month before Wendy Davis’s official announcement of her bid for governor, did not generate much attention, it provoked a great deal of consternation inside her circle for potentially undercutting the depiction of her as a single mother who overcame adversity pretty much on her own. Since the former couple almost never talk — Jeff Davis estimates that they have spoken “maybe five times” since the divorce was made final in 2005 — Angle thought it best to take the initiative. “He asked me to be more circumspect,” Davis’s ex-husband recalled. “It was subtle. It was, ‘Understand that there’s a big picture here.’ ”

The young woman Jeff Davis met 30 years ago waiting tables at a dinner theater owned by her father, Jerry Russell, was a country mile from where she is today. She was 20, short and thin, with frizzy dark hair and a prominent nose like that of her father. Her name at the time was Wendy Jean Underwood — the surname belonging to her first husband, a heavy-equipment operator from whom she had recently separated, taking with her their 1-year-old daughter, Amber. She had attended a single semester at the University of Texas at Arlington, but she lacked the money to go any further. In addition to her waitressing job, she worked at a pediatrician’s office while taking courses at a community college in hopes of one day becoming a paralegal. Meanwhile, Jeff Davis was a 34-year-old lawyer who had already served four years on the Fort Worth City Council and at the time sat on the board of her father’s theater company. A galaxy separated their life experiences. Still, when a mutual friend fixed them up at a Christmas party, the older man talked with the young woman for three hours and was transfixed by her depth and earnestness. When she drove away that night in her red pickup truck to her small apartment, he knew he wanted to see more of her.

There were additional qualities in the young woman that Jeff Davis did not immediately discern. After her father divorced her mother when Wendy was 13, she watched as her mother, Ginger Russell, doggedly and uncomplainingly worked menial jobs to feed her four children while instructing them not to think ill of their father — a feat of tenacity and grace that Wendy would not forget. But she also took note of how her father was willing to leave his family heartbroken and destitute in single-minded pursuit of his ambition to live the theatrical life. Or, as she would put it while speaking at his memorial service in September, “I learned the lesson of what it means to live your dreams.”

Jeff Davis and Wendy Underwood began dating. A couple of years later, she got a job as a paralegal and soon after enrolled at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth with the pure focus, she later told me, of eventually going to law school, selecting a curriculum that would best prepare her for the LSAT. At the end of her first year there, she married Jeff. Her second-year English professor, Bob Frye, would later note in a law-school recommendation letter that although she was pregnant at the time, “my records show that she did not miss a single class and turned in all of her work punctually.”

Frye and other T.C.U. professors viewed the straight-A student as exceptional beyond her grades. It seemed a foregone conclusion that she would be accepted into law school. But then Davis raised the bar. “My husband had gone to Princeton University,” she told me. “And when we first started dating, I had a lot of insecurities about not having done enough with myself. And I remember so vividly, when he would talk to peers and they would talk about, you know, their education or their travels, fine wines or foods, I just felt so left out of those conversations. And I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about it. And so I wanted to prove to myself, more than anything, that I could be one of those people, too. I could get an education like that, too.”