Popularity is optional as Republicans find ways to impose minority rule

A week later, Jones and Pearson were reinstated amid applause, whoops and cheers at the state capitol in Nashville. But few believe that the assault on democracy is at an end. What happened in Tennessee is seen as indicative of a Donald Trump-led Republican party ready to push its extremist agenda by any means necessary.

Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Republicans are increasingly out of touch with mainstream sentiment on hot button issues such as abortion rights and gun safety. Accordingly, the party has suffered disappointment in elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Yet instead of rethinking its positions, critics say, it is turning to rightwing judges and state legislators to enforce minority rule.

But while Democrats control the White House and Senate, Republicans have proved expert at finding workarounds, using cogs in the machine that have typically received less attention from activists, journalists and voters. One of them is the judiciary.

A legal battle ensued with the justice department pledging to take its appeal all the way to the supreme court. The political backlash was also swift.

If judges fall short of the Republican wishlist, state governors have shown willingness to intervene. In Texas, Greg Abbott has said he will pardon an Uber driver convicted of murder in the July 2020 shooting of a man at a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Austin, the state capital.

In Florida another Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has centralised power as he assails gun safety and voting rights, the teaching of gender and race in schools and major corporations such as Disney. On Thursday he signed a bill to ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

Minority rule is, more than anything, about race. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the population when Barack Obama was first running for president in 2008, they now make up only 44%.

Activists point to Republican-dominated state governments pushing legislation that would allow them to control Black-led cities and push hardline policies on crime. Examples include expanding the jurisdiction of state police in Jackson, Mississippi, and removing local control of the St Louis police department in Missouri. Republicans in the US Congress itself overturned police reform in Washington DC.

Then there was Tennessee where, on 6 April, Republicans sparked national outrage by kicking out Jones and Pearson, two young Black Democrats, as punishment for breaking rules of decorum a week earlier by leading a protest inside the house chamber. The demonstration was prompted by a March school shooting in Nashville in which three children, three adults and the attacker were killed.

Just as on abortion, Republicans are demonstrably at odds with public opinion on gun safety. A poll last year by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households.

Additional reporting by Lauren Gambino