Roughly 15-20 percent of Americans — and nearly one-third of Republicans — agree with core tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute.
The poll’s findings prompted one New York Times columnist to suggest that QAnon believers could soon “dominate the political system.”
“This is slightly less than the % of Americans who supported Trump circa early 2015,” wrote Max Fisher, who authors NYT‘s The Interpreter column. “Under our system’s structural imbalances, that’s enough to overtake the GOP and therefore dominate the political system.
“Reminder that QAnon orthodoxy explicitly calls, as a central plank of the movement, for publicly executing hundreds of thousands of Democrats and cultural figures,” Fisher added.
The poll found that 28 percent of Republicans agree that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders,” and that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
A slightly smaller number of Republicans, 23 percent, agreed that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
Notably, the poll also found that those who rely on right-wing outlets such as Newsmax, OANN and Fox News are most likely to be QAnon believers.
“Interestingly, even after controlling for partisanship and ideology, media news consumption is by far the strongest independent predictor of QAnon beliefs,” the report states. “Remarkably, those who report most trusting far-right media sources are nearly nine times more likely to be QAnon believers compared to those who most trust broadcast networks such as ABC, CBS, and NBC. Those who most trust Fox News and those who do not watch television news are 2.3 and 2.5 times, respectively, more likely than those who watch broadcast networks to be QAnon believers. Even with a range of controls in place, Republicans and conservatives are twice as likely as Democrats and liberals to be QAnon believers.”
Read the full report here, and check out a few more reactions below.