This QAnon Secretary of State Candidate Is Promising to Reinstall Trump in 2024

Jim Marchant, the GOP candidate for secretary of state in Nevada, appeared on stage alongside former President Donald Trump this weekend and openly boasted that he and his QAnon coalition of candidates would put Trump back in the White House in 2024.

“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re gonna fix the whole country and President Trump is gonna be president again,” Marchant promised as Trump stood next to him during a rally in Minden on Saturday night.

Marchant, who is currently the front-runner to win next month’s race, told the crowd that he and the ex-president had something in common.

“President Trump and I lost an election in 2020 because of a rigged election,” Marchant said, failing to add that a court dismissed his efforts to re-run the election for a U.S. House seat.

From the very first hours after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Marchant has led the effort to spread the falsehood that the election was stolen. “I have been working since November 4, 2020, to expose what happened and what I found out was horrifying. When I am secretary of state of Nevada, we’re going to fix it.”

“Fixing it,” in Marchant’s world, means eradicating mail-in ballots, doing away with vote tabulation machines, and binning voter registration rolls—which would force all Nevadans to re-register to vote.

Marchant failed to tell the crowd that some of the inspiration for his extreme policies comes from a QAnon influencer he’s been working with since November 2020.

“Juan O Savin,” whose real name is Wayne Willott, has been a major promoter of election conspiracies, and together with Marchant, as well as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, he’s helped build a coalition of candidates for secretary of state and governor in over a dozen states.

The coalition was revealed publicly at a QAnon conference in November 2021. On Sunday, the organizer of that conference, who’s known as QAnon John, wrote on Telegram that he was “good friends” with Marchant.

Along with Marchant, the coalition includes Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, Michigan secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo, and Arizona’s Mark Finchem, who is also running to oversee elections in his state.

While some of the coalition’s candidates have already lost their primaries or have little chance of winning in next month’s vote, there are several who are tipped to win.

That includes Marchant, who has consistently been ahead in the polls, despite being outspent by and holding many fewer campaign events than his Democratic rival Cisco Aguilar. 

“Marchant can’t be trusted, but I just don’t think a lot of people are even paying attention to the race,” said Donna West, a former chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, told NBC. “We’ve been knocking on doors, and people aren’t aware of the race. They still don’t understand what the secretary of state does.”

During his speech, Marchant also named Wyoming State Rep. Chuck Gray as being a member of the coalition. Gray is currently running unopposed for Wyoming secretary of state. Finchem, in Arizona, is leading the polls to become secretary of state there next month.

In their position as their state’s top election official, they would have the power to refuse to certify election results in 2024—and several of them have explicitly said they would have refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.  

Marchant’s coalition candidates have likely been helped by Trump’s recent embrace of QAnon at his rallies and on his Truth Social platform, giving GOP candidates who support QAnon legitimacy even as they support a violent conspiracy theory that the FBI defines as a domestic terror threat.

The continued resurgence of QAnon was seen again last weekend, when merchandise featuring the conspiracy’s mottos and iconography was on sale outside a Trump rally in Mesa, Arizona, on Sunday. 

For months, Trump’s team attempted to ban QAnon merchandise from these rallies, but in recent weeks—Trump’s endorsement of the conspiracy has become more explicit—flags, T-shirts, and mugs bearing the Q logo have once again become a common sight at these events.

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