“Beyond defending Trump himself, state and local Republicans are perhaps the party’s biggest advocates of the kind of white-identity politics that is sometimes referred to as Trumpism. For example, GOP officials at the state level are now trying to bar schools from using materials from the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which focuses on the central role of slavery in American history. Such bans would effectively use government power to censor part of the public discourse and silence a project hated by many conservatives because of its critical look at Trump-style white-identity politics. Also, GOP officials in states, not those in D.C., were the ones who pioneered laws designed to make it harder for liberal-leaning constituencies like Black Americans and college students to vote. Now, GOP officials in states are aggressively trying to limit vote-by-mail programs, after a 2020 election in which Democrats won in part because of strong turnout and Democrats voted by mail at much higher rates than Republicans.”

“In 2019, state party leaders canceled Republican caucuses and primaries, virtually eliminating any possibility for a GOP challenger to wage a serious campaign against Trump. In Trump’s bid to overturn the election results, GOP state legislators, local and state party officials and GOP state attorneys general were often enthusiastically supporting his moves, while Republicans such as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell generally didn’t condemn the effort but didn’t openly embrace it either. ‘The state level is where we see the most important democratic backsliding, and it’s happening at the behest of Republican state officials,’ said Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington who studies state politics. According to an analysis by Grumbach, the greatest predictor of whether a state has taken antidemocratic steps, such as really aggressive gerrymandering or efforts to make it harder for people to vote, is if Republicans control its state legislature and governor’s office. U.S. states are increasingly not ‘laboratories of democracy,’ Grumbach said, but ‘laboratories of democratic backsliding'” – FiveThirtyEight.