The pattern is pretty striking. Censures by county parties were until recently a rare event, affecting somewhere between zero and three people per year, I found. Most were issued over relatively modest local or factional party disputes. Republicans in Bexar County, Texas, for example, censured then-state House Speaker Joe Straus for blocking a number of conservative bills in 2017. In Mohave County, Arizona Republicans censured state Rep. Paul Mosley in 2018 for “conduct unbecoming” after he tried to abuse his position as a state legislator in order to get out of a traffic ticket.

But starting in 2020, the types of censures county parties issued shifted — both censures issued in 2020, for instance, had to do with COVID-19 mask mandates. In 2021, I found, there was just a dramatic increase in county-level censures, especially among Republican county parties. Republican county parties censured 23 GOP officeholders in 2021 compared to Democrats’ five, and what’s more, most Republican censures were tied in some way to the 2020 election, the subsequent Jan. 6 insurrection or the ensuing fallout.1Although censures are still relatively rare events — I found just 34 of them in more than 3,000 counties over the past seven years — the uptick in the last year signals a growing form of radicalism among local party committees. All of this points to yet another signal of a Republican Party undergoing a purge. Parties often wage ideological fights in their primary contests, but primaries take time. In this rash of recent censures, we’re seeing county party leaders trying to more emphatically assert which faction of the party is in charge, and as I’ve documented above, that could dramatically reshape the GOP at its most fundamental levels of government.