In the conversation between Coleman Hughes and Charles Murray, there was a point where they mooted the idea that white Democrats are smarter than white Republicans. Since the realignment of the Trump era, this seems to be a major issue, as college-educated white Democrats have become more Democrat and liberal, while non-college whites less so.
I’ve looked at this before, but I’ll look at it again, using GSS’s WORDSUM variable. Correlating with IQ at 0.70 the vocab test is decent if imperfect. I looked at the distribution in non-Hispanic whites from 2016 onward (race(1) hispanic(1) year(2016-*)) for WORDSUM, and broke it into the bottom 30%, middle 50%, and top 10%. Then I looked at distributions within each political/ideological class (column) and the proportions of each political/ideological class within the vocabulary bracket.
| Row = 100% | Column = 100% | ||||||
| 30th% in vocab | 60th% in vocab | 10th% in vocab | 30th% in vocab | 60th% in vocab | 10th% in vocab | ||
| Lib | 22 | 58 | 20 | 19 | 27 | 45 | |
| Mod | 38 | 54 | 8 | 43 | 32 | 25 | |
| Cons | 30 | 61 | 9 | 39 | 41 | 31 | |
| Dem | 27 | 57 | 16 | 31 | 37 | 53 | |
| Ind | 43 | 46 | 10 | 23 | 13 | 15 | |
| Rep | 31 | 61 | 8 | 46 | 49 | 32 |
Idiots favor moderation.
Intellect and wisdom are very different things. Democrats are slightly more intelligent, Republicans are slightly wiser.
Moderates are often neither.
Wouldn’t the results be influenced by the fact that most Ashkenazi Jews are Democrats?
Whites score better than blacks on IQ tests. Liberals scream “These tests are biased and racist!”
Democrats score better than Republicans. Liberals scream “It’s true! It’s true!”
It seems vocabulary is used as a proxy for intelligence. Probably as good a proxy as one can get. Vocabulary increases with education and an outward-focus, such as reading books that are challenging. Given the anti-science stance of Republican politicians, this all makes sense.
Indies and mods are people who lack information and/or interests in politics. They are usually disengaged until balloting time. They are the classic low information voters.
Democrats are increasingly an alliance of blacks and upscale, super liberal whites (and elite-aspirational non-black, nonwhites, e.g. children of immigrants).
Republicans are increasingly downscale and lower middle class whites and are shedding the country club- and the Chamber of Commerce-types.
Dems and liberals have been collecting more money from the corporate sector for a while now.
The political realignment continues.
If Democrats are so smart, how come they can’t tell the difference between boys and girls.
@razib, it would be interesting to cross with income. For example, do high-income smart whites vote more Democrats than low-income smart whites?
What is the most convincing deconstruction on the moronity of moderates and centrists, by the way? You’d think that one of the extremes would be the pinnacle of idiocy while the other would show some signs of superhuman intelligence (either degenerate communists or zealous fascisto-libertarians). Is it because politics is too brain-intensive for low-wits that they become unavoidably centrists? Or is it so that a mean temper and ideological aggression are just something that correlate with high cognitive performance due to some genetic and neurological factors? As in being moderate would simply be just too boring for a high-functioning brain?
Apologies in advance to the many, many intelligent Republicans, but this thread is pure gold.