That plan failed in 2020 because several of the states Trump needed to make the plan work — predominantly swing states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia — either had Democratic leaders or the few remaining honest Republican ones. These leaders simply wouldn't play along with the "fake electors" scheme, even in places where the GOP-controlled state legislatures were gunning for it. So, for the past year, Trump has been focused — with surprising intensity, considering how many other legal battles he has cooking — on trying to remove them from office. He's been championing replacements the media euphemistically calls "election deniers" — that is, Republicans who reject the results of the 2020 election and who wink at 2024 plans to invalidate election results they don't like.

As the Brennan Center noted, seven battleground states had GOP election deniers campaigning for governor. Four of those had secretary of state nominees who are election deniers, plus another, Amy Loudenbeck of Michigan, who flirts openly with the Big Lie. As of writing, four of the seven gubernatorial candidates have lost. Two others, Arizona and Nevada, are in races still too close to call. Only one of the seven, incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, coasted to an easy win. (And Florida is almost certainly voting Trump outright in 2024 anyway.) Three of the five sketchy would-be secretaries of state have already lost, while the other two are in elections currently too close to call.

In other words, Trump tried to install people into powerful offices who could steal the election for him. And most of them have lost. It doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet. If it's close enough in 2024, he may only need to steal one state in order to pull off a coup. (Or, heaven forbid, he could legally win, though that remains less likely.) But voters just built a firewall of honest state officials who will not let Trump tell them — as he tried to tell Georgia's secretary of state in 2020 — to simply "find" the votes necessary to steal the election. This setback should also send a larger message to the GOP: The public does not want insurrectionist politics. That could scare off some of Trump's allies from helping him, too.