When it came time for Mihaela Plesa, the vice-chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, to decide whether to flee the state with dozens of her fellow Democratic legislators, earlier this month, she felt torn. On the one hand, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, had proposed a radical plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to favor Republicans. By leaving the state, Plesa and her colleagues could deprive the Texas House of the two-thirds quorum required to approve the maneuver. On the other hand, Plesa wondered how she would explain a step that could undercut the appeals to bipartisanship that had helped her win election in a politically divided district anchored in Plano, a Dallas suburb. She also was skeptical that escaping the state was a winning tactic. Any success in denying Republ

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