I want to revisit a post I wrote in November 2016 about the link between education and a liberal political view. I have said in the past that the link extends to intelligence, not just education, but in hindsight I think that’s a little presumptuous. The fact is, at least as far as regions go, the average IQ of a population is going to be 100, whether persons in that region are marrying cousins, eating possums or launching satellites. The lack of education is also sometimes a lack of opportunity, not lack of ability. And this link between education and left-leaning politics is only a link, and many very intelligent people are conservative by nature. However…
I sought out lists of the US states ranked in order of education. I compared two lists I found and saw the rankings were nearly identical – for example the top 10 on each list was the same states but arranged slightly differently. Anyway, the numbers I am quoting are from WalletHub.com which arrived at its ranking by using 18 key indicators like attainment of degrees, quality of schools, national scholastic rankings, that sort of thing. I correlated this list with the recently ended 2024 US election. Kamala Harris only won 19 states, but of the 19 most educated states, she won 17, including the entire top 10. #11, Utah and #14 Montana were the only exceptions. Harris won two outliers: #29 California (no surprise) and #42 New Mexico, otherwise every state ranked 20 or lower voted for Donald Trump. The average Harris state was ranked 12.4, the average Trump state, 33.5.
When Covid was going on, I did a similar cross reference of education with levels of vaccinations and found the same thing. Poorly educated areas had very low rates of vaccinations. Death rates from covid sadly followed along, as you might expect. The five states with the lowest death rates had an average education rank of 9.2, and the five states with the highest death rates had an average of 45.4! This is a very strong link, more than I was anticipating to be honest. But when you think of the political climate of anti-vaxxers and the distrust of science that was being peddled by the right wing government of the time, the link makes sense and is correlated to the political points of view.
When I first brought this topic up, and at various times since, I think I may have pissed some people off by saying offhandedly that this was about intelligence, but I don’t apologize for saying it’s about education.