Quantifying Beliefs in Partisan Conspiracies

[This is Part Three of a three-part series: Part One, Part Two]

One thing that was admittedly missing from my posts on the GOP and the influence of the QAnon wing was hard data to properly contextualize the phenomena.

Rep. Liz Cheney has been serving as the focal point of the "normie" wing of the GOP due to her seniority and due to her voting to impeach Trump. According to polling by Axios, Greene is far more popular than Cheney among Republicans, with Greene enjoying a +10 net favorability while Cheney is at -28 net favorability.

Polling by Pew showcases some trends on QAnon. First, a lot more people became aware of QAnon between Feb and Sep 2020, going from 23% of all Americans to 47%. Support for QAnon distinctly falls along partisan lines, with QAnon unequivocally a GOP phenomenon according to this poll. 90% of Democrats say that QAnon is either "very bad" or "somewhat bad", while 41% of Republicans think it's either "somewhat good" or "very good" (32% and 9% respectively).

Ipsos conducted some polling on "misinformation". When asked whether "A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media" is true (perhaps the most succinct summary of QAnon), this poll found broader bipartisan support, with 21% of Republicans and 13% of Democrats saying yes. Similarly, "Donald Trump will soon announce mass arrests of “traitors,” including major Democratic leaders and business figures" was rated as true by 16% Republicans and 12% Democrats. Both of this are significantly higher than a lizardman constant, and cut against the idea that QAnon is uniquely a Republican phenomena. I was surprised by both of these findings.

There were other findings from that poll. "The people who broke into the Capitol were undercover Antifa" was agreed with by 34%/10% R/D respectively. Whether Biden "legitimately won the 2020 election" was agreed with by only 27% of Republicans and 93% of Democrats. That last one isn't necessarily surprising since the losing side of an election often believes the process was unfair (See Democrats after the 2016 election), but this is with serious claims about fraud as the backdrop.

As someone who finds no basis whatsoever in either the electoral fraud, undercover Antifa, or similarly situated theories, I find these trends concerning. I recognize there is a significant performative aspect to answering polls. Similar to the point raised a few days ago here on this topic, if you really believe the election was literally stolen through a widespread campaign of coordinated fraud, I can't imagine a better casus belli for armed revolution. The fact that it hasn't happened (yet) leads me to conclude the belief is not sincere. The exception being, of course, the folks who participated in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th.

Further evidence that this belief is not sincerely held are instances of its swift abandonment when it becomes too costly to hold. See for example how quickly people like Lou Dobbs and American Thinker capitulated when they received defamation letters from Dominion Voting Systems, and see especially the now infamous Mike Lindell Newsmax incident which unraveled in real time.

So what I suspect is actually happening with this polling is both that the questions afford a great deal of leeway in their wording, and answering is at least partially motivated by performative tribalism. For example, whether Biden "legitimately won" can be truthfully and earnest answered in the negative if you believe something along the lines of "the last minute expansion of mail-in voting was unfair". No lich Hugo Chavez required. Similarly, the claim about undercover Antifa could also be truthfully and earnestly believed, if you believe that finding at least one person (John Sullivan) who had a history of attending BLM protests to be a sufficient nexus for the claim. After all, there were thousands of people there, and finding unequivocal evidence about one person (even if he was publicly excommunicated by Antifa months prior) could be indication of many more.

The findings showing a high favorability of Greene could just be "Greene = Trump, Trump = Good, therefore Greene = Good" transitive property thinking, just like "Cheney voted to impeach Trump, so she's bad". Not everyone who answers should be expected to have an intimate command of the relevant details of the story. I see this thinking explicitly embraced by members of my favorite subreddit. There is definitely a range of technically true responses to these questions that you can engineer. The questions therefore are best understood as a tribal signal because everyone translates it to what it "really means" in their head. The same is true for election fraud claims. If you ask me whether election fraud happened, the answer is obviously 'yes' (because every election has at least one person who committed some fraud). So you have to append an increasing number of qualifiers to the question ("widespread", "sufficient to change the election outcome", etc) to make sure you're asking for what you intend on asking.

But my concern remains the same. There are no guardrails in place. If craziness gets embraced so long as it's tribalisitically beneficial, there's nothing in place to keep it in check. The whole strategy also strikes me as flailing. If you support Trump as a proxy for economic nationalism, his presidency appeared to have significantly set that agenda backwards. If the trends I outlined previously continue, the GOP is going to continue scaring the normie suburban voters away and the selection effect is going to leave behind advocates who are undeniably zealous in culture warring but practically ineffective in delivering the supposed policy goals. I'm not happy with this direction because I genuinely want a robust GOP to provide a check on many of the Democrats' more ridiculous policies. The only thing I really have to give me hope are Trump's SCOTUS picks, but there's increasingly nothing left for me to support, both politically and intellectually.

P.S. An interesting side effect of the rise of QAnon is that allegations of real child sex abuse are received with increasingly more skepticism from the public at large:

Over the summer, Q followers began using #savethechildren to spread the conspiracy theory, and it worked. From Aug. 9 through Aug. 15, more than 12,000 public Facebook posts used the hashtag, according to the social media tracking tool CrowdTangle. The rest of the year, the hashtag tended to garner fewer than 200 posts per week.

But most of the content shared using #savethechildren was based on a Q-fueled and completely warped picture of what child trafficking looks like in this country. And that has made life difficult for the people who actually do anti-trafficking work.

“It’s extraordinarily frustrating,” said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, co-founder and executive director of My Life My Choice, an anti-trafficking nonprofit. “We’ve worked so hard for the last 18 years to shift the narrative and have people understand this is happening in our communities. QAnon instead gives folks this incredibly sensationalized ‘other’ to fear and be angry about.”