That strategy is newly relevant now, as the Republican Party looks to complete lame-duck-session power grabs in state legislatures in Wisconsin and Michigan, preemptively stripping power away from incoming Democratic governors. Those moves are characterized by Democrats as brazen and unprecedented “coups” by a party that was soundly beaten in the midterms but, through anti-democratic means, has managed to exert undue power.

But those midwestern power grabs are not necessarily shocking or unpredictable. Rather, they are an extension of the underlying strategy that had already been the major organizing principle of the GOP even as Priebus wrote his report. For decades, the Republican Party prepared to keep power even as it represented a coalition that became the minority. Now, the plan is in full effect.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when this became the destiny of the Republican Party. One could go all the way back to when the 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater broke the Democratic stranglehold on the Jim Crow South, picking up Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas on an anti-civil-rights agenda, initiating the proto “southern strategy” and sparking a realignment of white conservatism with the GOP. Or the story could start just a year later, when the Voting Rights Act ushered in the first era of anything resembling true democracy in the country’s history, and also set in motion an anti-voting-rights insurgency in the South.

Closer still, the gerrymandering and geographic polarization that have become so critical to modern Republican plans might not have been possible without the “white flight” in the 1960s and ’70s associated with that conservatism, and with the nascence of white suburban evangelicals as a political force under Ronald Reagan. The deep partisan differences creating unbridgeable policy divides in swing states might not have been so deep without the scorched-earth politics of the 1990s, and the power of technocratic tinkering at the margins of elections and voting rights might not have been so apparent without the infamous presidential election in Florida in 2000.

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Even nearer to the modern moment, perhaps Wisconsin and Michigan are the end results of a chain of events that only became inevitable with the dawn of technologically sophisticated GOP redistricting campaigns in 2000 and 2010, with the reality-warping corporate bonanza of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, or with 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, which defanged federal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

Any one of these moments could be a viable starting point for assessing just what happened in the 2018 election, when Republicans lost the popular-vote margins at just about every level of politics, but still managed to limit Democratic power in some meaningful ways. There’s Wisconsin, where—relying on surging turnout across the board, and a spike in black and Latino voters—the Democratic challenger Tony Evers defeated the GOP incumbent Scott Walker to claim the governor’s mansion. Republican state legislators moved quickly to handcuff Evers’s office.