AB

In 2008, the Republicans saw not just the election of the first black president, but also that there was a very diverse coalition behind the first black president. You had 5 million new voters cast a ballot in 2008 and of those 5 million new voters, 2 million were African American, 2 million were Latino, and 600,000 were Asian American. So virtually the entire growth of the electorate was nonwhite voters, and these voters voted overwhelming for Barack Obama.

The Republican Party, which is a largely white party, saw the writing on the wall, and they really only had two options. They could either try and change their policies to go after this younger, more diverse, more progressive electorate, or they could try to prevent them from voting. They did the latter. The way they were able to do this was to get power at the state level, and once they had power at the state level they were able to begin checking the Obama coalition and enshrining white Republican power — both through efforts to make it harder to vote and then also through gerrymandered maps that would keep them in power for the next decade.

So beginning in 2010, the states became a laboratory for Republicans to try to prevent the Obama coalition from becoming the new normal in American politics.