Talk Elections

http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/1357-pew-research-republicans-more-knowledgeable-than-democrats

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Right-wingers tend to be wealthy, have moderate-to-high degrees of educational attainment, and when energized be astonishingly anal about easily memorized and deployed numbers and details?! Say it ain't so!!!

Actually as a crude generalization, the Dems have the dumbs and the smarts (aka those elitist insufferable aholes with graduate degrees), and the Pubs have what is in-between. There are just more dumbs than smarts is all. :P

Nailed it. Though we should perhaps be saying 'extremely well-educateds' and 'poorly-educateds' rather than 'dumbs' and 'smarts', those terms don't exactly roll off the opeboist tongue quite as well, ne?

No, dumbs and smarts are the purest form of opeboisms, and have a certain je ne sais qua that ponderously tying out "well-educated" and "poorly-educated" just don't. I was careful to insert a reference to graduate degrees so that everyone would know what I meant. I didn't want to get near "Beyond the Bell Curve" country right now. I have enough problems. :)

Oh, I understand you, Torie, I was just pointing out why we were deciding to use such pure opeboisms for the benefit of any others who might stumble across this thread in their traverse of Atlas Forum this fine spring evening.

Indeed...this is only going to be shocking to the dumbs (undereducated) on the left.

I don't know what exactly makes the results of this quiz breaking news, seeing as it's been around since at least November of last year (http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/07/what-the-public-knows-in-words-and-pictures/).

For what it's worth, here are the relevant numbers for each question:

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This will vary depending on the questions.

For example, 34% of Republicans think Obama is a Muslim, versus 10% of Democrats: http://www.people-press.org/2010/08/19/section-1-obama-and-religion/

Only 30% of Republicans think evolution is real, while 57% of Democrats do: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-250_162-2917719.html

I'm still embarrassed by some of those results. Comon people, Harry Reid maybe duller than a rock, but you should at least know who he is...

Interesting that poor post grads are even more reliably Dem than the poor w/o HS. Presumably the rural poor shift enough away from the urban poor to make that so. I'm guessing that the income axis is simply the five quintiles.

Those are unusual categories for income. The first three correspond reasonably well to the three lowest quintiles so each would have about 20% of the population. The 75 K is a little high for the third quintile (65 K would be better), and adds about an additional 5% or more to the sample there. If that were the only issue, I wouldn't have much to quibble about.

However, If I wanted equal numbers of people in each data point, the next cut shouldn't be at 150 K. That leaves only about 5% of the population in the uppermost bin and about 30% in the next to highest bin. The cut should be at about 100 K, so it's not close to a balanced sample. The effect is that any attempt to draw conclusions from the slope of the line at the high-income side will be skewed by the shift of population from the top data point into the next-to-top point.

That's a very small sample of questions to determine knowledge of current events.

I'v always thought that one of the most uber-Dem demographics was low-income highly educated people.

Ah yes, the bitter graduate students, who suddenly realize their fate.