Ms. Hegar is certainly no chicken. You may remember the viral video “Doors,” which recounted her childhood dream of becoming a pilot and her subsequent experience “opening, pushing and sometimes kicking through every door that was in my way.” Along with getting shot down and wounded, she waged a lawsuit against the Pentagon that ended the exclusion of women from ground combat. Ms. Hegar, who has taught at the University of Texas McCombs school of business and has been a consultant at Dell Computers, also has a campaign-ready bio called “Shoot Like a Girl.”

She will need every ounce of fight she has for this race. This isn’t Beto vs. the Beast — Mr. Cornyn, unlike Ted Cruz, isn’t a serial alienator in the Senate and beyond. He can point to success on Hurricane Harvey relief and stricter background checks for gun purchasers, even if it took the Sutherland Springs massacre to force his hand. It won’t matter to his base that he supports President Trump’s horrendous border policies and elimination of the Affordable Care Act and has a voting record on women’s health that is perfectly in sync with the Pleistocene age.

The creepy thing is that the latter may actually be an advantage here. Lots of people thought that when Ann Richards was elected governor in 1990 it signaled the birth of a new, more progressive Texas, but in many ways that dream was stillborn. Yes, our major cities are blue and even once-red suburban counties are trending that way. But rural voters still turn out en masse, and their conservative values and beliefs still make statewide races a bitter and losing battle for gender equality.

As cited by The Texas Tribune, the electorate here is 53 percent female, but not even a fourth of the 150 members of the Texas House are women. The State Senate has nine women out of 31 members. Only one major Texas city can claim a female mayor, Betsy Price in Fort Worth. As the C.E.O. and co-founder of The Tribune, Evan Smith, put it: “The government of Texas looks nothing like the state it governs. We are worse on the gender front than the color front.”

So what kind of a woman do Texas voters — the ones who actually vote — really want? As is the case in many places, the rules for Texas women are contradictory and forever changing. Sassy but respectful, smart but not showy, strong but ladylike, shrewd but always and forever sweet. Ann Richards, however beloved nationally, lost her bid for re-election to George W. Bush, who never got punished for being himself.