A more interesting question is why do people on the left feel the need to ‘show’ or ‘prove’ that folks who voted for Bush are stupid? Or that people who don’t agree with them are stupid, ignorant, evil, ect etc? Its like you can’t have a different political philosophy unless there is something wrong with you…why is that?
-XT
In the interests of fighting ignorance, the most plausable reason that most Kansas seniors didn’t take the SAT test is because the ACT test is more widely used in the Midwest (which would include most of the states not included in your post).
An ACT to SAT score conversion can be found here.
The average ACT scores for students taking the test in 2004 are broken down by state here.
Seventy-five percent of Kansas graduates in 2004 took the ACT, with an average score of 21.6 (which translates roughly to a SAT score of 1015).
Maybe because it’s simply the stating of a fact, like the fifteenth decimal place of Pi?
I mean, we’ve already got studies showing that folks who listen to conservative news media are more misinformed than folks who get their news elsewhere; that folks who vote for Bush hold more misconceptions about news events; that folks in conservative “red states” have a higher rate of divorce. Why can’t the act of simply mentioning these results be taken as nothing more than “stating the truth”? Especially here on the SDMB, where we’re supposed to be out fighting ignorance, instead of reveling in it?
“Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth.”
–Plato
Thank you, Polerius, for injecting some supported figures and analysis in the thread.
This is, charitably, a loaded question. Less charitably, well, I’ll save that for later.
The meta point is that the Bush re-election (this time as last time) represents the victory of religious values, propaganda, and populist anti-intellectualism over real policy, measured analysis, and intellectualism. It would therefore seem sensible to look at the data more closely, and confirm whether the poorly educated and/or lower intelligence voters were indeed more likely to vote for Bush. This is a distinct possibility and apparently suggested by the evidence so far.
In my own experience and analysis, the Bush voters = lower intelligence thesis is provisionally valid. Simply put, the better educated and mentally incisive voters would have a greater chance of seeing through the stinging haze of burning bullshit that Bush and Co have fired over such issues as Medicare (misleading as to the real cost of the prescription-drug plan), Iraq (seriously distorting the case for war and cherry-picking intelligence), post-Saddam Iraq (failure to plan adequately for occupation), special interests (just in october Congress changed a 5 billion dollar tax break WTO requirement for exporters into a monster special interest orgy to the tune of 137 billion dollars – which Bush signed with no problems), taxes (with cuts that benefit substantially and primarily the rich, in the face of massive growing deficits), education (waving around the No Child Left Behind rhetoric for a plan that, four years after election promises, still lacks funding) income and wealth (obscuring the fact that the wealth gap is actually widening to levels not seen since the 1920s, and that this will have serious impact on the broader dream of “ownership society”), and many other issues.
So, while these factors may be obvious to many, to many more they are not at all clear. Why? Possibly because the majority of people are propagandaphagous, craning their heads back to drink from the fountain of their political religion. Yes, the US is a two-party system and much the same happens with Democrats, but in this case the Democratic platform actually had it more or less right. The informed choice in matters ranging from foreign policy to the domestic economy was Kerry. He may not have been the best candidate, but he certainly offered a viable way forward as opposed to more “staying the course” as the wagon is repeatedly driven down cactus-covered escarpments.
Instead, the uninformed choice prevailed. One must ask why. Was it popular eagerness to swallow propaganda and subscribe to a system of belief, as I mentioned earlier? Was it the calculated politics of fear, the anxiety at changing leadership in the middle of a purported “war”? Were there any overriding concerns of such importance that they could make the majority vote for the candidate more likely to make things worse? Was it simple and honest ignorance of the real issues, possibly as a result of message saturation across a vast number of media? There are a number of possible answers; not a whole lot of them make Bush voters look very good, quite irrespectively of petty party politics.
Yeh, I had seen that, but there’s an important word there called “largely”, plus the analysis is on 2000, before those smart New Hampshire people made the switch. My thanks to Polerius too.
Actually, looking at the figures has improved my perception of Republicans. It’s very easy to over-simplify the American landscape these days.
When I was young, I saw the town mouse/ country mouse idea for the first time when some pundit explained that Montana would never vote Democrat and Boston would never vote Republican, as they proved in 72. But it wasn’t so stark then - I seem to remember that the Democrats could win Texas, and produced a Texan president. I seem to remember that the Republicans could win California, and produced a couple of Californian presidents.
Now, this red/ blue map is going round the world saying North plus East Coast plus West Coast is Dem, Mountains plus Praires plus South is Rep. And it’s staying that way, and the pundits talk about a divided nation. Bush is from the middle bit and in touch with the middle bit. The Democrat candidates - no longer from the South - don’t seem to be. It’s very easy to see it as town v country and forget the complexities (and even forget cities like Houston)
Britain has a town/ country division too - rural areas are more conservative, but especially in the richer South. But here, the traditional stereotyped image of the rural right wing voter is not that of a hick, but a tweedy middle class person with money and education.
Aren’t the stereotypes rather different in America? I think they are from the simplified external viewpoint anyhow. From my point of view, it’s easy to assume that those clever Crane brothers are probably Democrats. And those clever Practice lawyers. And the Seinfeld gang etc. etc. But what are the powerful images that Americans give us of the people who live in core Republican states like Alabama or Nebraska? Well, I can’t help but think of Badlands and Mississippi Burning and Deliverance.
I blame those film makers and TV producers that McCarthy failed to weed out myself. They should have set Frasier in Memphis. For balance.
Polerius
Of the 2,826,757 who voted for Kerry in Illinois, how many had higher scores than the 2,313,415 who voted for Bush?
1,589,345
So, 1,237,412 of those who voted for Kerry had equal or lower scores than the 2,313,415 who voted for Bush? Is that anything to brag about?
I guess you don’t recognize sarcasm.
Wow. That is impressive, and just as suspect as the OP. I will absolutely guarantee you that the good folks in Iowa are on the whole no smarter nor dumber (in terms of IQ scores) than anywhere else. They definitely do not have an average IQ one standard deviation greater than the mean. (Nor do the folks in Mississippi have an IQ one standard deviation below the mean).
DanBlather, nicely done! I suspected as much, because I had just been looking at per capita murder rates for Kansas a week or two ago. Sheesh!
Do you mean that you answered my question sarcastically? There was sarcasm to be found in these symbols: 1,589,345?
Let’s assume for a moment that average IQ is actually a useful measure of the intelligence of a state’s population. Let’s further assume that the figures cited by the OP were gathered and presented accurately and fairly. We know these things are not true, but just play along for a moment, please. Given these assumptions, the cited table implies that states that vote Republican are full of stupid people and that stupid people vote Republican. This is, of course, shockingly dumb, misleading, and a fine example of why we liberals are losing this country.
In southern states, the poor and uneducated racial minorities tend vote for Democrats while, conversely, the wealthier, better educated southerners whose IQs are on par with the best and brightest Yaley tend to vote for Republicans. Additionally, a large number of extremely smart New York stock jockeys, Harvard Business School grads, Connecticut bankers, and California technology barons vote for Republicans. Even if we had some valid analysis of intelligence by state, it would be meaningless due to the fact that different demographic disparities are at play across various geographic, economic and educational lines.
The sharp division in this country is not due to geography, the weather, economics, shoe size, education, pet ownership, race, lunar cycles or religion. There is a subtle, deeply rooted cultural difference that supercedes all of these. As long as my allegedly intelligent fellow liberals focus on incidental corollaries like average IQ, our cause, along with our nation, is going to hell.
There are only a few things that mobilize the GOP’s base better than perceived assaults and insults from what they have so effectively labeled the “liberal elite.” If we really are more intelligent, then we will always win. In order to be more intelligent as a whole, we must eradicate from our ranks the stupid, crap “statistics” generated for the purpose of spewing childish insults.
A museum patron asks the guard how old a particular dinasour skeleton is. The guard says “11 Million 13 years and 6 months”. The patron says “how do you know that so precisely”? The guard says “I was told it was 11 million years old when I started working, and that was 13 years and 6 months ago”.
I can’t access the image but anything that is grouped by the states cannot be used to analyze differences between Bush and Kerry supporters. The demographics simply aren’t the same; for example, the South has much higher minority populations compared to the ivory Northeast.