The New Election Conspiracy Theory That’s Coming From Liberals

After the election, a new theory spread quickly on TikTok that a heroic presidential candidate was quietly investigating corrupt deep-state actors who rigged the results, waiting in the wings until those corrupt actors could be rounded up and tried for their crimes.

If that theory sounds familiar, it’s because it’s reminiscent of QAnon. But the new conspiracy theory, which arose after the 2024 presidential election was called for Donald Trump, features Kamala Harris in the role of the avenging criminal prosecutor, and was spread by liberals. It promises that Harris will soon make things right—that she was the true winner of the election, that she will still take office in January, and that the real plans behind her loss and concession will soon be revealed.

Welcome to “BlueAnon,” a set of conspiracy theories that mirror right-wing narratives about Donald Trump from across the partisan divide. The phenomenon was very visible after the first assassination attempt against Trump, which many online accounts theorized had been staged. But it has become even more ascendant in the aftermath of the election this month, and is particularly notable for adhering so closely in structure to the “Stop the Steal” narratives laid out by Trump supporters four years ago.

The claims have been spread on X, Reddit, Instagram, Threads, and elsewhere, to many thousands of likes and millions of views. In some cases, social media users have shared claims of having evidence of invalidated ballots, or ballots that didn’t show up in the system. Others speculated that Russians or some other groups could have hacked voting machines and switched Harris votes.

Some questioned how swing-state Democrats could have possibly successfully elected certain Senate candidates but not Harris. Others pointed to an incorrect chart—made with incomplete data—that showed there were 18 million fewer Harris voters this year than 2020 Biden voters. (Ironically, conspiracy theorists on both sides used that particular chart to bolster their claims: Harris voters suggested that it was proof that the 2024 election had been meddled with, and Trump voters suggested it was proof of meddling in 2020. “Where did those 20 million Democratic voters go?” Dinesh D’Souza posted the day after the election, about the chart. “The truth is, they never existed.”)

More recently, Harris voters have fixated on a theory that Elon Musk changed massive numbers of votes to swing the election for Trump using his company SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites. On Nov. 10, a decommissioned Starlink satellite fell to earth and burned up on reentry—something it is designed to do. But to the suspicious, the satellite had been purposefully destroyed to cover evidence of election interference.

Voting machines generally run on a closed network and are not connected to the internet; Musk could not have possibly tampered with votes through Starlink or any satellite. But the theory is potent because it takes its cues from some of the very real, powerful influences that did shape the outcome of the 2024 election. Musk was heavily involved in Trump’s win; he’s the richest man on Earth, and he poured funding into the Trump campaign. His political advisers spearheaded a deceptive, dark-money campaign to microtarget already disaffected Democratic voters. Plus, Musk controls one of the largest social media platforms in the world and has no problem pushing vile rumors and misinformation, which is also out of control (even without his help) in our modern political environment. But his actions, experts say, did not add up to active interference in the election outcome.

The Starlink conspiracy theory is interesting because it shares its contours with the Italygate voting conspiracy theory from the 2020 cycle. According to that theory, people working in the U.S. Embassy in Rome used satellites to remotely switch votes from Trump to Biden. (Similar conspiracies proposed that supercomputers could have switched ballots.)

“This all feels very familiar,” said Sam Howard, the U.S. politics editor for NewsGuard, a media monitoring organization.

According to Howard, NewsGuard found that mentions of “Starlink” were seven times higher on the Sunday after the election than before it, with 281,644 mentions on X that day. And that was just X, which has easier metrics to track; the conspiracy theories may have been more widespread on other social media platforms.

Many people who shared these claims did so while insisting they were different from Trump supporters who backed Stop the Steal. “This isn’t even a conspiracy theory,” one person said on Reddit, laying out their reasoning. “It’s a logical hypothesis based on past evidence.”

According to Robyn Caplan, a professor of technology policy at Duke University, these users’ behavior can be explained in part by something called the “third-person effect,” a widespread belief that others are more influenced by mass media—ads, articles, internet screeds, but also misinformation.

Liberals often convince themselves that they are less susceptible to misinformation because they see themselves as being on the side of institutions such as journalism and academia that prize facts and verify information, Caplan said. The left, she noted, has prided itself on “more of a claim to truth and knowledge.” (The right believes that it is more resistant to misinformation than the left because it isn’t brainwashed by liberal educators, she said.)

In reality, these experts noted, the impulse to quibble with election results from either direction comes from the same place: an individual conception of political affairs that does not align with reality. This is only heightened by our information bubbles: Algorithms and social circles have led basically everyone to believe they are more representative of the electorate than they turn out to be.

The truth is that the left is not immune to the same factors that create conspiracy theories on the right. But there are some crucial differences between the two camps. Howard at NewsGuard said that the BlueAnon claims he saw seemed to be largely from accounts he classified as “obscure” or “fringe.” “They may have large followings,” he added, “but they don’t seem to hold sway offline as much.” (He said there was also no evidence of substantial foreign interference in the discussion.) The claims, he said, also seem to already be waning.

A.J. Bauer, a journalism and media professor at the University of Alabama researching conservative news, argued that every election leads to “some subset of people who are skeptical about the results” simply because they are caught off-guard and confused by it. “A lot of the early things that appeared to be election skepticism around liberals is mostly fog-of-war stuff,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong or unusual about humans filling uncertainty with uncertainties of conspiracy thinking. I think it goes with election time.”

What matters, he said, is that no one in any kind of leadership position has seized on the doubt. Unlike Trump, Harris conceded. And neither journalistic institutions nor Democratic leaders are fanning the flames by alleging that these conspiracy theories are real.

“You’ll forever be able to find examples of people being wrong on the internet,” Bauer said. “The real question is how those ideas are utilized by people in power.”