I concede there are very intelligent Trump supporters, specifically those in high income tax brackets who are all about the GOP core tenants of lower taxes and pro corporate policies. However, I have a real hard time understanding how low or even middle income citizens support Trump. Hardcore racists aside, in my experience many of theses Trump supporters are un or under educated and likely have an IQ around room temperature.
Am I completely off base here?
I would posit that lower IQ demographic make upwards of 10% or more of his base because - lets be honest here - Trump is, clinically speaking, one of - if not the - lowest IQ POTUS in modern history.
That 10% is key to winning and the secret to this BEWILDERING support numbers IMO.
Well, nobody has ever done testing for particular political demographics.
That being said, some factors to consider are:
Academic attainment does not necessarily correlate to IQ - many people who do not go to college, do not because of financial or other circumstances, not necessarily due to lack of intelligence.
Democrats have their own demographic that may be low IQ as well: inner city/urban low-income minorities, etc., which may neutralize the IQ factor.
Even if Trump voters have low IQ, insulting them won’t do a thing. You don’t need IQ to have sperm or eggs. They can reproduce and bear future Trump-ish voters with no difficulty. Slamming them as low-IQ won’t make them stop voting or existing.
FWIW, when I was in Mensa (way back in the day, in 2013; my membership lapsed), I was startled at how many conservative/libertarian/hostile-to-liberalism members were present in its online discussion. One woman complained that the Mensa-member message board was dominated by conservative voices. I haven’t been back in a while but I would definitely bet on there being substantial Trump support there.
I don’t think IQ or any untestable aspect of intelligence per se has much to do with it. The very brightest people can twist their rationalizations around the oddest of beliefs.
I remember that when Bill Clinton was president the SDMB sounded to me to be conservative thanks to constant threads against policies or acts by Clinton, I decided to join anyway as they were fair and not shy of crisscrossing the administration or anyone being guided by ignorance or arrogance back then. The fact that the SDMB sounds more liberal has IMHO more to do with the current administration willfully grabbing the idiot ball nowadays.
I do think that a similar thing is going at Mensa, we should not forget how the Mensa leaders were not impressed about Trump’s boasts of intelligence a few years back.
Not much came from that offer but clearly the Mensa people was tossing a dig at the silly boasting of the president.
“Depending on their social IQ, those prone to boast tend to do so indirectly by demonstrating their depth of knowledge in conversation or by sharing their ideas.”
Says the member of an organization whose membership is attained not by demonstrated knowledge, not by conversation, not by impressive and persuasive ideas, but by test scores.
Trump took a million from his father and turned it into billions, working in the complex, competitive, and bottom-line business of Manhattan real estate. He later lost most of it, but that kind of sustained success doesn’t happen as a fluke. Nor does gaming the system to escape bankruptcy with a huge chunk of cash remanining.
Then with minimal training in marketing he turned himself into an international brand, earning billions in licensing. Then with no training in show business, he turned himself into a long-running televison star. Then with no experience in politics, he got elected president. That kind of repeated success, across multiple highly-competitive, zero-sum domains, defeating many other very smart people, does not happen by accident.
Hate on Trump’s personality and political agenda all you want. If you think he’s dumb … well you’re probably the kind of person that thinks test scores impress anyone outside of Mensa.
It’s not IQ, but education and especially experience interacting with others. And by ‘others’ I mean those who don’t look like you, think like you, or seem to hold the same values as you.
I have said it before on this board, but the best remedy for ignorance-based bigotry is to live in a city like mine, Toronto. Over half of us weren’t born here yet all of us are made better by seeing all the good people who don’t look like us.
Trump was exploited by smarter people than he because they saw that Trump was very good at attracting the kind of people to whom Trump is what intelligence and success looks like. Trump is nothing more than a useful idiot for TV Producers, and foreign banks and investors who used him to launder money.
It’s not about test scores. Intelligence is about how someone is able to express thoughts and ideas, and demonstrate abilities other than maniacal self promotion, schemes requiring low cunning, crooked attorneys and accountants who do the thinking for him.
I’ve never seen a reputable source that indicated his holdings were ever more than ~$3B. In fact, current estimates are about $2B.
IMO receiving a pile of money and ending up with only 1/3 to 1/2 of what investing it in a S&P 500 fund would yield is hardly showing much financial intelligence.
I think Trump took $400 M from his father and turned it into 6 bankruptcies and I wonder if his net worth today is even positive. How much does he owe Deutschebank and how much to Russian banks?
I just heard a joke today about the sum of the ages of the likely Democratic candidates and the sum of the IQs of the Republican candidates were both 150. Really? Pence has an IQ of 125?
I don’t think it’s intelligence – it’s values. There are a lot of Americans who place a high value on the denigration and suffering of non-white people, of immigrants, of women, etc. There are a lot of Americans who place a high value on angering liberals. And of course there are a lot Americans who don’t value that stuff, but also don’t really care about opposing it either, and value Republican judges, lower taxes on the rich, tough talk on immigration, etc., far more than they value fighting against the denigration and suffering of minorities, immigrants, and women.
Sure, and you just linked to it. In 2015, before he got into politics, Forbes valued him at $4.1 billion. His claims to be a super-duper dealmaker that rose from nothing are obviously bullshit, but so are the claims from his opponents that he was just handed everything. He clearly held his own and survived in a high-stakes, bottom-line, highly complex industry full of extremely smart people and in which a lot of people get crushed and lose everything. Taken by itself, maybe you could say he got lucky, but as noted, he’s also had massive success is other, quite disparate, domains. A truly dumb person doesn’t just blunder into all of that by luck.
He may well be low-IQ by the standards of other presidents, but that’s sort of like being a bad coach in the NFL: you’re still smarter most of the people in the crowd yelling how dumb you are.
Ya know, Velocity’s calling out specific groups of Dems as being low IQ doesn’t come off looking too good especially because he mentions minorities.
However, I think it’s quite true that Democrats have plenty of less than intelligent supporters. There’s so many dumbfucks in this country you just know they’re not all supporting one party. Lots of stupid in all colors, creeds, races, eye-color, height, gender, etc. Plenty to go around.
Of course that goes then to dismiss the boasting of president Trump too. Remember, he commented about the Mensa challenge and claimed that he could win handily against Tillerson. Trump essentially chickened it out.