This new article from Medium.com concludes that Trump voters are 3-5 points dumber than Clinton voters. Wrong.
The General Social Survey asked respondents whom they voted for in 2016. I'll exclude immigrants since the IQ test is biased against people who aren't good at English (sample size = 891). The mean IQ for Hillary voters is 99.20. For Trump supporters, mean IQ is 99.32--slightly higher.
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That Medium guy was only looking at white voters, can the same be done with the GSS?
ReplyDeleteThe author needs to be careful. He's likely to be called a racist for acting as if non-white voters are a non-entity. Medium is trying to imply that Trump voters are dumb. I've shown they are not.
ReplyDeleteOn the white issue, the author is basically right: According to GSS data, mean IQ for Trump voters is 99.25. For white Hillary voters, it's 103.74. For nonwhites: Trump, 99.96; Hillary, 95.36. I need to write an article for Medium where I ignore whites. The title will be, "Trump Voters 5 Points Smarter Than Hillary Voters."
Most Trump supporters are overwhelmingly white--and let's be blunt--many are Western chauvinists and the worst racist or at least many of his loudest supporters are. I think this matters to them that vis-a-vis white people they're on the lower end of the scale. They already assume they're smarter than blacks or Mexicans if my--admittedly unscientific--observation of relatives, friends and acquaintances in rural Oregon & Washington is anything to go by.
DeleteOk, but it's obviously not as simple as that either. If you state we shouldn't separate (cherry-pick) whites out due to his assumption that racial gaps are large and thus we should remove that factor, then you running the numbers on the complementary sset and not including the whole set ALSO misses the mark for the same reasons. We can simply back out the averages for all, if you'd like to make it fair.
ReplyDeleteFrom the 2010 US Census:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
% of Whites in America: 72%
% of Non-Whites in Amerca: 100%-72% = 28%
Thus:
Average IQ of Hilary Voters: (0.72)(103.74) + (0.28)(95.36) = 101.4
Average IQ of Trump Voters: (0.72)(99.25) + (0.28)(99.96) = 99.4
Same result if we don't allow segregation...so I don't think he was trying to SAY anything. He eliminated some factors, yet even when you leave them in the results are essentially the same.