WHEN partisan political realignments take place, they tend to come not subtly but swiftly. Karl Rove’s dream of a permanent Republican majority looked feasible in 2004, doubtful in 2006 and laughable two years later. Similarly, the talk of Republicans facing demographic extinction seemed far more plausible in 2008 than in 2010, when Republicans took back the House of Representatives and seized 20 state-legislature chambers from the Democrats.

Among them were both houses of the General Assembly of North Carolina, a quintessential swing state. Just two years earlier, in 2008, Barack Obama won North Carolina by the narrowest of margins. He lost the state in 2012, and Republicans—thanks in part to crafty redistricting in 2011—consolidated their state-level gains, winning supermajorities in both houses and electing Pat McCrory, the Republican former mayor of Charlotte, as governor. Republicans took control of North Carolina’s state government for the first time in a century, despite a voter-registration disadvantage of more than 750,000.

The legislature and Mr McCrory got to work quickly. In February North Carolina reduced the maximum duration of unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to between 12 and 20 (depending on the state unemployment rate), and trimmed weekly benefits from $535 to $350 in order to accelerate repayment of a $2.5 billion debt to the federal government for unemployment benefits during the downturn. In late July Mr McCrory enacted a law prohibiting state insurance plans from covering abortion and requiring abortion clinics to meet the same standards as walk-in surgical centres. North Carolina also passed one of the most restrictive voter-identification laws in the country: in addition to requiring voters to show government-issued photo-ID in order to vote, the bill also curtails early voting, eliminates same-day voter registration, eliminates pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and allows any registered voter to challenge the eligibility of any other voter in the state.

Claude Pope, chairman of the state Republican Party, noted that a law requiring voter ID “polled exceedingly well”; a poll in February showed that 72% of North Carolinians supported one. But while legislators were at work inside the legislative building in Raleigh, the state capital, protests started growing outside. The first were convened by the state chapter of the NAACP, an advocacy group, to protest about the voter-ID bill outside the legislative building every Monday, starting on April 29th. These “Moral Monday” protests, led by pastors, grew from about a hundred to 15,000, by the organisers’ estimate, at the end of the legislative session in July. William Barber, head of the North Carolina NAACP, says their ultimate purpose is to harness “new demographics and a changing electorate” to “break through the white southern strategy that has dominated the South for the past 50 years”.

Since the end of the legislative session Moral Mondays, like North Carolina’s legislators, have dispersed. But on a sticky late afternoon last Monday several hundred people gathered in Downtown Park in Southern Pines, a small town in a Republican area of North Carolina. Speakers attacked the voter-ID law, low education funding and laws restricting access to abortion. Maurice Holland junior, secretary of the Moore County NAACP, said the protests are about “finding the most motivated people” and getting them to rally support for the 2014 mid-term elections. “That’s how we got into this mess,” explained Mr Holland. “In presidential elections everyone’s engaged…but in 2010 everyone sat down.” Towards the end of the rally Mr Barber urged each member of the audience to register 50 new voters. “No more off elections,” shouted Mr Barber. “2014 has to be on. I mean really on.”