Election deniers are more likely to believe in alien visitation

An unsurprising result among a surprising population.

Just a few years ago in 2021, a pair of political scientists polled registered voters in Louisiana to see if there was a link between belief in alien visitation and election denial, and found that there was: Among voters who believe extraterrestrial aliens have visited the Earth, 58% were election deniers, and only 35% were not.

The correlation is an unsurprising one, since both are based on a fundamental belief in a hidden “deep state” that controls and spreads disinformation. If the government is lying about its knowledge of aliens, then they’re also likely to be lying about the integrity of the election.

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Louisiana is a red state where 60% of the voters voted for Trump in 2024, so we might question whether this result was foreordained simply because of respondent’s majority-Republican partisanship. But no. Among these Louisiana voters who are Democrats, 34% believe in alien visitation, but among the Republicans only 26% do:

Louisiana Democrats also exhibited another surprising trait: A full 24% of them joined the overwhelmingly Republican belief that the 2020 election was stolen. This tells us that conspiratorial belief runs deep in Louisiana, suggesting that conspiracy theories have higher traction there among every demographic, even among those not usually associated with that particular belief.

Why would this be? The answer could well be a very simple one. Of US states, Louisiana ranks 48th in educational attainment; and it’s well known that we see a pretty clear correlation between lower education and belief in conspiracy theories.

The lesson to draw from all of this? You kids stay in school.