When etcd goes through a leader election by design all clients should fail fast and retry. The reason for this is during an election technically no leader exists so we can not server liniearized transaction. Instead of timing out fail fast and retry.

Here is Clayton's take on the issue:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FHH70woKNkrTw3fN7Ss7rNCkTX69WWSnArlrFN_ENGs/edit