A 2010 study using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, for example, found that the IQs of young adults who described themselves as “very liberal” averaged 106.42, whereas the mean of those who identified as “very conservative” was 94.82.
An 11.5 point gap is pretty serious stuff.
Now of course anticipating the usual (retarded) rejoinders in the comments to come, I must point out the obvious: many conservatives are smart, even very smart. However, I must say that most geniuses that I have met (including my own family) have been more or less pretty liberal people.
I had one brother who was always sort of a conservative Democrat. He later married a Republican Vietnamese refugee (all Viet refugees are Republicans) and started voting Republican for a while, much to my family’s horror. He recently has come back around and voted for Obama twice. I expect that there are probably a lot of conservatives out there with genius IQ’s though; it would not surprise me one bit.
But of course we are talking averages. Duh. So on average, your average conservative is much stupider than your average liberal. What is truly frightening about this is that obviously a lot of liberals are Blacks and Hispanics. Now obviously Black and Hispanic liberals are going to have fairly low IQ’s due to race. And even with all of the lower IQ liberal Blacks and Hispanics driving the average liberal IQ down, liberals still have a massive IQ gain over conservatives! Now that just an appalling statement about how dumb conservatards are.
Incidentally, this is not the only study that has found this. A number of other studies have found that smarter people tend to be more liberal than conservatarded people.