The Democratic Party, Party of Stupid

I assume that you knew this already. I assume that everyone knew this already. The Democratic voter base is not filled with the best and the brightest. It is filled by people of highly questionable intellectual capacity. Why else would they be so keen to have government take care of them?

To be more accurate, the Democratic voter base is filled with ignorant people who vote Democratic because they believe it's the best way to pretend that they are not ignorant. After all, America's intellectual elites are invariably leftists.

As you also know, last week a mentally challenged man named Don Lemon broke in a fit of hysterical laughter over the notion that Trump voters were ignorant rubes.

He was preaching to the choir. He was reflecting an important socio-cultural point. The average celebrity-- that is, people who think that Don Lemon is funny-- is a high school dropout. Rich high school dropouts love to pretend they are smart, even sophisticated. Some even pretend to be policy wonks and serious thinkers. Do you really think that Robert de Niro and Alyssa Milano and Leonardo di Caprio know anything whatever? Since they make a living pretending to be characters they are not, they have no problem pretending to know how to think.

Anyway, the good news is that a group called the General Social Survey has tested the intellectual capacity of those who voted for Donald Trump and those who voted for Hillary Clinton.

Matt Margolis shares the results at Pajamas Media:

On the verbal ability test (WORDSUM), not surprisingly the median number of vocabulary questions correct was the same for both Clinton and Trump supporters: 6 out of 10 words correct. The mean verbal ability score for Trump supporters was 6.15 words correct, while the mean verbal ability score for Clinton supporters was 5.69 correct, a difference of nearly a half a question on a 10-question test. This moderate difference is statistically significant at p<.0005.

Further, Trump supporters score significantly higher on verbal ability (6.15 correct) than the rest of the public combined (5.70 correct), whereas Clinton supporters score significantly lower on verbal ability (5.69 correct) than the rest of the public combined (5.98 correct).

Margolis explains that when it comes to knowledge of science, Trump voters scored higher:

Trump supporters also have greater science knowledge than voters who supported Clinton in 2016. According to the survey, "on six questions Trump supporters offer the correct answer significantly more often than Clinton supporters."

It gets worse for Team Hillary. GSS reported:

Indeed, less than half of 2016 Clinton supporters (49.6%) are able to answer correctly both of two related questions: whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth (EARTHSUN) and whether that takes a day, a month, or a year (SOLARREV). Remember these two questions are multiple choice! You would have a 50-50 chance of guessing correctly on the first part: whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa. Sadly, the general public didn't do hugely better than Clinton supporters, with only 57.1% (compared to 49.6%) knowing that the earth goes around the sun and that it takes a year to do so.

And these are the people who insist that the science of climate change is settled and that we should shut down the fossil fuel industry.