Opinion The odds of a Trump coup attempt in 2024 are dropping fast
But the decision is better seen in a broader context: It’s one of many recent developments that show our democratic system is fortifying itself on many levels, unexpectedly reducing the odds of a rerun of Trump’s efforts in 2024.
Along with the ruling, virtually all election-denying candidates for governor and secretary of state in key swing states lost in the 2022 midterms. Congress reformed the law that governs how presidential electors are counted. And the national response to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection has been surprisingly robust, from the House hearings documenting the gravity of that event to the successful prosecutions of the attackers.
None of this was preordained. It happened because the American people made it happen — and because key actors in our system in both parties took the threat posed by Trump and his movement seriously.
“The political and legal systems have taken significant strides toward protecting the integrity of elections against subversion at all levels,” Matthew Seligman, a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, told me, though he added that “grave threats remain.”
The court ruling, which upheld the North Carolina Supreme Court’s invalidation of a gerrymander by the state legislature, largely rejected the “independent state legislature theory,” meaning state legislatures will not be insulated from review by state courts and the dictates of state constitutions when setting election rules.
As a result, a state legislature probably can’t appropriate for itself the power to appoint presidential electors in defiance of the choice of voters, as Trump pressed for in 2020. While other constitutional provisions might prevent this, now it would be directly subject to state court review, as election law expert Richard L. Hasen explains for Slate.
A caveat: As Vox’s Ian Millhiser notes, the ruling leaves the door open for the Supreme Court to uphold a state legislature’s action if it decrees that a state court has gone too far constraining it. But something dramatic like appropriating absolute power to appoint electors after voters have spoken seems unlikely to survive.
Meanwhile, Congress’s revision of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 prevents any future governor from certifying fake electors. That makes it harder for a MAGA-aligned governor to help a state legislature execute such a scheme. And the 2022 defeat of many gubernatorial candidates aligned with Trump means they’re not in a position to execute this anyway.
Now, Democratic governors in the key swing states can veto a state legislature’s effort to change state law to appoint sham electors. The court ruling would mean state legislatures no longer have “free floating power” independent of the state constitutional structure, Hasen says.
There’s more. If MAGA-aligned candidates for secretary of state had won in 2022, they’d have been well-positioned to execute other mischief, such as interpreting state voting laws or citing fake election fraud to invalidate a particular precinct’s voting, says Cameron Kistler, counsel at Protect Democracy.
“Having election-denying secretary of state candidates lose across the board is an important bulwark against election subversion,” Kistler told me.
And lawyer John Eastman is facing disbarment proceedings for fabricating a rationale for Trump’s coup attempt.If Eastman loses, it could dissuade Republican lawyers from future schemes. Take all this together, and far fewer opportunities will entice the next enterprising, young Eastman to exploit cracks in our edifice of democracy.
In key respects, our national response to Jan. 6 has been unexpectedly good. It has been animated by the idea that Jan. 6 wasn’t a fleeting spasm of MAGA rage, but rather a sign that Trump and parts of his movement pose a lasting threat to our constitutional order.
All these developments vindicate that reading. By dramatizing it, the Jan. 6 hearings helped bring down election-deniers in 2022 and inspire Electoral Count Act reform, which might not have happened if the public hadn’t been on high alert about democracy.
There is an important principle at stake here. It’s sometimes argued that if bad actors are determined enough, they will succeed — that banking on reform and good-faith actors holding the line against efforts to corrupt the system is futile.
The counterargument is that while no reforms are bulletproof, our best hope is to shore up the system wherever possible and lend support to good actors — such as the Republicans who held the line in 2020 and the Democrats who beat those election deniers in 2022 — who want to make it function. This view has also been validated: All these developments will make future election subversion harder, no matter how determined its perpetrators.
In short, our system has acted in meaningful ways to protect itself. Much remains up in the air, and we shouldn’t become too sanguine, but if you had predicted these developments back when the smoke was still clearing from Jan. 6, it would have seemed hopelessly naive.
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