QAnon is truly a 'fringe' -- but belief in their conspiracies is stronger: poll

Polling of Americans reveals that only 10 percent of people believe in QAnon conspiracies, CNN noted. Given the large number of people who attended former President Donald Trump's rally ahead of the attack on the Capitol, it was assumed that the Q community was much larger than it actually is. Instead, it's that they're louder.

Polls last month showed that only 2 percent of people were willing to admit they were QAnon followers. Last September, Pew Research Center cited just 9 percent of Americans who said they thought QAnon was good for the country. Unsurprisingly, there is a greater number of supporters for Q in the right-wing.

"The insurrection and other events over the last few months (including Trump's defeat in the November election) seem in aggregate to have made QAnon even more unpopular than it was," said CNN. "While the percentage who weren't sure or didn't know dropped from 56 percent in September to 45 percent in January, the positive views of QAnon went from 3 percent to 2 percent. Meanwhile, the negative views jumped from 30 percent to 42 percent. Neutral is still at 11 percent."

It's a dramatic shift from conspiracy theories from former President Barack Obama's presidency. As late as 2015, 29 percent of Americans said that they believed Obama was a "secret Muslim," he's not. Those who believe in the racist birther conspiracy that Obama wasn't born in the United States rank at 13 percent. When pollsters pushed undecided people to pick one opinion or the other, 20 percent said there was "solid evidence or suspicion" that Obama wasn't a citizen.

While CNN maintains that these numbers clearly indicate that QAnon is a fringe, polls about QAnon don't fully test the conspiracies believed by QAnon people.

For example, a full 40 percent of respondents in a December NPR/Ipsos poll said that they believe the coronavirus was invented in a lab in China, a frequently cited conspiracy by QAnon believers.

The same poll showed that one-third of Americans believe that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election due to voter fraud, despite courts, election officials and Trump's own Justice Department saying the opposite.

"Increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn't have any basis in reality or fact," Ipsos' pollster Chris Jackson explained.

See the full report at CNN.com.