Found a really interesting post on Half Sigma about how the average IQ of the parties shifts as smarter people move away from certain values and ideas. From the post:
Once upon a time, the Democratic Party was the party of the less intelligent and the Republican Party was the party of the more intelligent.
But today, the Democratic Party is the party of both the less intelligent and the more intelligent while the Republican Party is the party of the middle. This doesn’t seem to me like a stable situation.
It remains to be seen if the 2004 data is a fluke: either a statistical fluke or related to a specific antipathy that high IQ respondents have to George W. Bush and not to the Republican Party as a whole.
Well, I guess that was kind of obvious actually. It goes along nicely with some new research that suggests that people who startle more easily tend to be more conservative and another, older study I remembered that found that liberals’ brains were more able to change and remain open to new experiences and ideas.