Democrats accept on faith that they are smarter than Republicans. Indeed, accepting this as a matter of faith is a key tenet of “Urban Progressive Privilege“.

And the fact is, I’m always leery of surveys and social “science” that try to correlate virtues – intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and on and on – to political orientation.

But it seems that, Don Lemon’s cackling notwistanding, it’s just not true. Trump voters, and the general public, outscore Clinton voters on science, verbal skills and, yep, map-reading.

The whole thing is worth a read. I’ll pull this quote for the fun of it:

Overall, on most science knowledge questions Trump supporters score significantly higher than Clinton supporters and significantly higher than the combined non-Trump supporting public. If, however, you asked about beliefs, rather than knowledge, on evolution and the origins of the universe you would get substantially better answers on individual science questions from Clinton supporters than Trump supporters.

And someone needs to pass this bit here along to Don Lemon and Mary Louise Kelly:

Testing the hypothesis that Republicans were significantly better at finding an unlabeled country on a map than Democrats, one 2013 Pew study supported that hypothesis (Republicans were indeed significantly more likely to pick out Syria on a map), while the other 2013 Pew study reported that Democrats were insignificantly better at picking out Egypt on a map.
Thus, neither of these two studies supports the CNN’s panel’s ridicule of right-wing map reading, and there is some weak evidence pointing in the other direction. Of course, this was a test of Republicans, not Trump supporters, but Trump supporters did better on the 2018 GSS verbal ability test and on 2018 science knowledge questions, so there is no strong reason to suppose that the results would be radically different if one were to test Trump supporters today rather than Republicans in 2013.

As a conservative in Saint Paul, none of this is news to me.