Election 2004 - The Infamous IQ/Intelligence Factor

Compiled by David Pakman

          Months before the election, a buzz started regarding the IQ's of Bush and Kerry voters, and information regarding their intelligence and education. A lot of this rumor was centered around a website which released a list of state IQ's, accompanied by the candidate expected to win, and it was overwhelmingly favorable to the blue states. It indicated, with a few exceptions, that the Kerry states were all at the top of the list in terms of intelligence, and the Bush states at the bottom.

          This list has finally been declared bogus, as it was simply a sham put together to create an uproar over the internet. I have come up with a variety of indicators to get to the reality of the alleged intelligence, or lack thereof, of voters. The two sets of data are a yearly education study conducted by Morgan Quitno Press, and an independent study conducted by a professor of psychology at Virginia Tech.

First, the Morgan Quitno Press study.:

          Before analyzing the data, comes the methodology for this study. According to the Morgan Quitno organization, Smartest State designation is awarded based   on 21 factors chosen from Morgan Quitno’s annual reference book, Education State Rankings, 2004-2005.  To calculate the Smartest State rankings, the 21 factors were divided into two groups: those that are “negative” for which a high ranking would be considered bad for a state, and those that are “positive” for which a high ranking would be considered good. Rates for each of the 21 factors were processed through a formula that measures how a state compares to the national average for a given category. The positive and negative nature of each factor was taken into account as part of the formula. Once these computations were made, the factors then were assigned equal weights. These weighted scores then were added together to determine a state’s final score (“Smart Rating” in the table.) This way, states are assessed based on how they stack up against the national average, which is set at 0. The end result is that the farther below the national average a state’s education ranking is, the lower (and less smart) it ranks. The farther above the national average, the higher (and smarter) a state ranks. Note: This study does not include Washington DC.

          Now on to analyzing the results. What can we determine from this data?

          -- First, there are a total of 19 Kerry states and 31 Bush states. Since there are more Bush than Kerry states, we will deal with the proportions of Bush and Kerry states, rather than the raw numbers, for our comparisons.

          -- Of the Kerry states, 12 of 19, or  63.2%, are above the national average for intelligence. 7 of 19, or 36.8% are below.

          -- Of the Bush States, 11 of 31, or 35.4% are above the national average for intelligence. 20 of 31, or 64.5%, are below.

          Overall, we can determine that Kerry (blue) states outperform the national average for intelligence by a ratio of 2 to 1, while Bush (red) states under perform it by the same ratio, 2 to 1. In other words, 2/3 of the Kerry states are of above the national intelligence average, while only 1/3 of the Bush states are. However, this does not paint the whole picture. Let's look at the average intelligence for each candidate's states:

          -- Average Smart Rating for Kerry (blue) states: -1.26

          -- Average Smart Rating for Bush (red) states: -3.74

          On the whole, the average Smart Rating for Bush states is almost exactly 3 times lower than the average Kerry state rating. A decidedly bad indicator is that overall, all states have a below average Smart Rating.

          To avoid angering half of the country, I will leave qualitative interpretation of the data for those who wish to interpret it. The numerical data I presented here can be verified by simply doing the math over again with the table data.

          To corroborate this data, here is a map of education across the country. It measures the percentage of people with a bachelor's degree or higher, and was assembled by the Census Bureau.

Click Next to go to the second set of data.

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