QAnon Is . . . Somewhere Between “Concerning” and “Hair on Fire”

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This is a quick follow-up to my post about QAnon a couple of days ago. I was wondering how popular QAnon really was, and came up with two polls: one said it had 3 percent support and the other said it had 9 percent support. That’s a huge difference.

Now there’s a third poll, and it puts the number at . . . 7 percent.

If you average these polls you come up with about 6 percent. That makes it more than the typical 3 percent you can get for just about anything in the United States, but less than the 9 percent that would indicate a scary level of support. This is, let’s say, concerning but not yet much more than that.

And a quick note: even if the correct number is 3 percent, that represents 8-10 million followers. So whenever you hear about a QAnon forum having “millions” of fans or something similar, ignore it. It’s meaningless. In a country the size of the United States, a few million just isn’t that many.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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