PRESCOT, Ariz. Pamphlets, buttons and American flags made a messy stand after stand for political candidates at a conference center in Prescott, Ariz. this month. But the table for Ron Watkins, a Republican candidate for Congress famous for his ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, remained empty.
“I thought it started at 11:30 a.m.,” said Orlando Munguia, Mr Watkins’ campaign manager, who arrived about 30 minutes after the event started and hastily prepared campaign materials without taking the candidate in tow.
Mr. Watkins, a computer programmer in his thirties, is confronted with the same reality that many other QAnon-linked candidates have faced: Affiliation with the conspiracy theory does not automatically mean a successful political campaign.
More established Republican rivals have greatly outraged Mr. Watkins in Arizona’s second district. Two other Arizona congressional candidates who have shown some level of support for QAnon are also following their competitors in raising funds ahead of the Aug. 2 primaries. A fourth Arizona candidate with QAnon ties has suspended his House campaign. The same trend is taking place nationally.
Their bleak outlook reflects the changing role that conspiracy theories play in American politics. The Republican Party flirted with QAnon in 2020, when several Q-linked candidates sought senior positions and Q merchandise appeared at rallies for then-President Donald J. Trump across the country. Yet identification with the movement emerged as a political obligation. As they have done throughout this election cycle, the Democrats attacked Q-linked candidates as extremists, and all but two—Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado—lost their races.
But many QAnon themes have been dug deeper into mainstream Republican politics this year, experts say, including the false belief that “evil” deep-state agents control the government and that Mr. Trump is waging a war against them. Smart candidates have found ways to tap into that excitement — all without explicitly mentioning the conspiracy theory.
Indeed, just a few booths away from Mr. Watkins’s in Prescott, other campaigns suggested the election results could not be trusted, an idea QAnon helped popularize.
“The actual iconography and branding of QAnon has really been pushed aside,” said Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory researcher and the author of “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.”.” “People don’t really identify as QAnon believers anymore.”
“But QAnon’s views are massively mainstream,” he added.
During the campaign, Republican candidates avoid talking about the idea that a clique of pedophiles is preying on children, a core principle of QAnon. But they embrace false claims that liberals “groom” children with progressive sex education. When criticizing Covid-19 restrictions, many Republicans riff on QAnon’s belief that a “deep state” of bureaucrats and politicians wants to control Americans.
More about democracy challenged
However, the most prominent topic of conversation with echoes of QAnon is the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Mr Trump. The movement pushed that idea long before the vote, and before Mr. Trump catapulted the claim to the mainstream.
According to States United Action, an impartial nonprofit organization focused on elections and democracy, at least 131 candidates who announced bids or ran for president this year to run for governor, secretary of state or attorney general have supported the false election claims. .
By comparison, according to Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group, only 11 out of 37 congressional candidates with a history of boosting QAnon have so far gone from the primaries to the general election. Only one of them, JR Majewski in Ohio’s Ninth District, has a chance to bolster QAnon’s representation in Congress. In total, Media Matters has linked 65 current and former congressional candidates to QAnon so far this year, compared to 106 in the 2020 election.
JR Majewski and Mr. Watkins did not respond to requests for comment.
Experts point to Kari Lake, a former news anchor considered the frontrunner in the Republican primary for Arizona governor, as a model for Republicans deftly navigating conspiracy theories for political gain.
But at a recent campaign shutdown, it was election fraud that got all the attention. Hundreds of Trump supporters crowd a raucous country music bar in Tucson. No one in the crowd appeared to be wearing a QAnon shirt or hat, items often seen at Trump rallies. A woman who sold flags and bumper stickers outside the event also had no Q merchandise.
“A lot of these people, like Kari Lake, don’t directly believe in Q or QAnon,” said Mike Rains, a QAnon expert who hosts “Adventures in HellwQrld,” a podcast that tracks the movement. But by pushing the story of electoral fraud, Ms. Lake gets “their support without really knowing the inner workings of the movement.”
Ms. Lake was introduced at the event by Seth Keshel, a former army captain who travels around the country making debunked claims about the 2020 election.
“Everyone knows Arizona didn’t go to Joe Biden,” he said incorrectly, before calling on “civil soldiers” — a term reminiscent of QAnon’s “digital soldiers” — to guard the ballot boxes.
The crowd roared as Mrs. Lake took the stage. Soon she was repeating lies about the election. “How many of you think it was a rotten, corrupt, fraudulent election?” she asked for a toast.
A spokesperson for Ms. Lake declined to comment.
Polls show that QAnon remains popular, with about 41 million Americans believing the basic tenets of the conspiracy theory, according to a 2021 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute. But stories of voter fraud are even more popular.
Among Arizona Republicans who support Trump, 27 percent believe QAnon’s theories are largely true, according to OH Predictive Insights, a political research group in the state. That compares to 82 percent who believe the election was stolen.
Of Arizona Republicans more loyal to the Republican Party than Trump, only 11 percent believe QAnon’s theories are largely true and about half believe the election was stolen.
Disinformation watchdogs warn that a slew of candidates supporting the Arizona electoral fraud stories could win three key races controlling the election: governor, secretary of state and attorney general.
Mark Finchem, a state representative and the leading candidate for secretary of state, also focused his campaign on electoral fraud. He attended the January 6 rally and said Arizona should put aside election results from the provinces it considered “irreparably compromised.”
Mr. Finchem spoke at a conference in Las Vegas last year hosted by a QAnon influencer, where Mr. Watkins also spoke. On his campaign signs at busy intersections across the state, one of his slogans reads, “Protect our children,” evoking a popular QAnon phrase, “Save the kids.”
“The broader culture war picked up some of the more conspiratorial tendencies associated with QAnon,” said Jared Holt, a QAnon expert and senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “There was a merger to some extent.”
Abraham Hamadeh, a candidate for attorney general of Arizona, rose in the polls after Mr. Trump offered his belated endorsement. He and other candidates for attorney general said during a debate in May that they would not have signed the certification of the 2020 election results.
Mr Hamadeh and Mr Finchem did not respond to requests for comment.
There was also no shortage of election deniers in the race for Arizona’s second congressional district, where Mr. Watkins is running his long-running campaign. During an awkward televised debate in April, he distanced himself from QAnon, saying, “I wasn’t Q, and neither am I.” He turned to election fraud conspiracy theories and noted that Mr Trump had retweeted him on the subject. But he was outflanked by his competitors.
“The election has been stolen. We understand that and we know that,” Walt Blackman, a Republican in the Arizona House of Representatives, said during the debate.
mr. Watkins may have believed that Arizona’s embrace of conspiracy theories could propel him from online celebrity to real-life politician, said Mr. Holt. But it proved difficult to stand out in a race where no one was behind QAnon and almost everyone supported the conspiracy theory of voter fraud.
“Occasionally, someone in the conspiracy brain on the right gets a lot of attention online and they think that means they’re popular,” said Mr. Holt. “So they try to run to the office or have a personal event somewhere, and it’s just a miserable crash and burn.”
