August 6, 2025

In politics, as in life, timing is everything.

Great leaders understand when to act boldly and when to hold the line — when to compromise and when to walk away. In elections, successful candidates understand the electoral calendar and leverage it to their advantage.

In 1992, former President Bill Clinton knew it was a good time to run for president, at a moment when virtually every other Democratic politician thought the incumbent president – George H.W. Bush – was unbeatable. Sixteen years later, it was then-Sen. Barack Obama, who understood that his star would never burn brighter than in a primary contest against Hillary Clinton.

For all the good he accomplished in office, President Joe Biden tragically miscalculated how long his mandate to be a “bridge” to a future generation of Democrats should last. The result was that Vice President Kamala Harris had only 107 days to run a general election campaign. We now know that it was simply not enough time.

It is therefore somewhat surprising that Republicans, spoiling for a fight over mid-cycle redistricting, chose Texas as the place to do so. Texas has one of the nation’s earliest deadlines for candidates to qualify for the 2026 ballot. Candidates for the U.S. House can begin filing their paperwork on Nov. 8, 2025. The last day to do so is only a month later — Dec. 8.

That means Republicans have little more than three months to enact a new map before it is simply too late for it to impact the 2026 cycle. While 90 days is a long time for legislators to stay out of state, it is certainly not an impossible notion. Compare that to the situations Republicans potentially face in California and New York, where the deadlines for filing are months later in 2026.

This disparity and the compressed timeline Republicans face in Texas likely explain, in part, why they suddenly seem so panicked about time. It may also signal a way out of the mess they have created.

Signs of GOP disarray are everywhere. For example, Gov. Abbott filed a petition yesterday asking the conservative state Supreme Court to declare the Democratic legislative leader’s seat vacant. Later in the day, however, the Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a letter in the same court asking that the governor’s petition be dismissed.

While Paxton’s reasons for this public humiliation of the governor may be more complex, the result is clear: Abbott’s motion is likely to be denied, handing Democrats their first victory. Though Paxton has said that he will file his own lawsuit in the coming days, the damage, in many ways, has already been done.

While the governor and attorney general were fighting with each other, the state’s senior senator — John Cornyn — floated his own idea for how to proceed. In a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel, he suggested that perhaps the FBI could help arrest the legislators currently in Illinois and thus outside the jurisdiction of Texas law enforcement.

This has landed with a silent thud. The FBI has no basis to arrest legislators currently located in Illinois. Nor, if they did so, would they have any obvious way to explain to a federal judge what they were doing and why they should be permitted to transport these individuals to Texas. Essentially, Cornyn’s plan boils down to the FBI kidnapping several dozen Texas state legislators in Illinois and then scurrying them to Texas.

When Republicans began this gambit, I assumed they had a thought-through plan that considered the timing of their actions and how they would handle Democrats’ countermoves. It seems that I gave them too much credit.

For the first time since this saga began, it appears that Democrats have the upper hand. Time is on their side.

And it appears that some national Republicans have drawn the same conclusion. After opposing federal legislation that would ban partisan gerrymandering and mid-cycle redistricting, a trickle of House Republicans seems ready to reconsider. If Texas fails — particularly if either New York or California proceeds — that trickle will likely become a torrent.

It would be truly ironic if we end up with a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering and mid-cycle redistricting because Texas Republicans miscalculated their political and legal position — and time simply ran out. I am not ready to say this is realistic, and it is still not likely, but the time seems right for something to break our way.