Politicians across Texas are scrambling this week to file for election before the Friday deadline, now that months of grappling over Congressional and statehouse maps has finally come to an end.

The official primary date has been set for May 29, with the runoff scheduled for July 31. Had all gone according to state Republican leaders, we would have all been voting in our respective primaries tomorrow on Super Tuesday. But in spite of much moaning about the implications of the delay, now that the candidates know what their districts are, they can start running their primaries in earnest.

The maps that will be in use for the next election cycle largely favor Republicans — as the original map did — with some exceptions that minorities and Democrats are claiming as small victories.

Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, a San Antonio Democrat and head of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said it best in an interview with Bloomberg:

The Republicans appear to the Done With The Whole Thing as well, evidenced by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s statement saying that the interim maps — approved by a panel of judges in San Antonio on Feb. 28 — closely reflected the intent of state GOP lawmakers.

When the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature redrew its legislative and Congressional lines during the 2011 session, as required every 10 years to keep up population growth, Democrats and voting-rights activists said it was unfair to minorities and illegally gerrymandered, and sued to change it. The new maps are the definition of compromise — for the two years they’ll be in effect.

“In light of the State's legal arguments, the San Antonio court only modified the Legislatively enacted plan in response to alleged Voting Rights Act violations — while leaving virtually all other districts as they were drawn by the Legislature,” he says. “In doing so, the court properly rejected the demands by some plaintiffs to draw drastic and overreaching interim maps.”

One of the GOP’s biggest targets was Fort Worth Democrat Wendy Davis, who forced lawmakers into a special session over education funding when she blew up the last night of the 140-day legislative session by filibustering a bill that was required to pass before the state could cut $4 billion from public school funding.

The morning after, she was both a pariah and a hero, depending on who you asked, and her 2008 win over Republican incumbent Kim Brimer was still a sore spot among plenty of conservatives who just wanted her gone. The state-drawn map blew her district to pieces. The interim map brings her back.

The interim map also allows Democrat Marc Veasey, another North Texas legislator, to announce his candidacy for the new Congressional District 33, which was drawn to favor a minority candidate (and which didn’t initially exist in the first round of state-drawn maps). He's one of a handful who hasn't been able to file for re-election to his seat or election to a new one due to the uncertainty.

Veasey says in his press release that he wants to be an “ally to Obama.”

“He needs strong support from new members of Congress to help turn back Republicans who will stop at nothing to undermine the President on the key issues most important to us all,” Veasey says.

That has to annoy the Republican leaders in Texas, who managed to whittle down Texas’ Democratic delegation in Washington to nearly nothing 10 years ago.

The new election date, as Politico points out, is a boon by nature to the myriad opponents Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a Republican, faces in his run at the U.S. Senate seat that will be vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison this year.

Dewhurst has won statewide election twice three times and has considerable name recognition over his opponents — who could use the extra couple of months to try and knock him off his throne in time for the primary. Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz and former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert are his opponents.

The two U.S. Senate seats, obviously, were not up for debate in the maps issue because — just like in the other 40 states — Texas gets two and they’re both statewide. But as you can see, the battle that affected the lines in only about five percent of the Texas House has ripples well beyond that handful of districts. Nobody really expects that the scales will tip in favor of the Democrats as a result of this new map. The 2010 elections gave the Republicans a supermajority in Texas House and almost that in the Senate.

Most people in the Capitol predicted that the stronghold would be slightly weakened in the 2012 elections, as not even Texas can hang onto such a GOP stranglehold for very long these days. (Anyone who saw the 88-seat majority by House Republicans dwindle drastically between 2002 and 2008 can tell you that.)

But it’s a safe bet that these maps won’t help them that way. Look for a few more Dems in the Texas House for the 2013 legislative session. Look for the redistricting maps to come up all over again. And meanwhile, brace yourself and look for the speed traps, baby. The race is finally on.