Long time readers know that it's trivially easy to extract information from the GSS that political moderates and independents are not as intelligent as partisans and ideologues. New readers are not always familiar. A comment:
#8 Do you have something to back up the idea that independents are less intelligent? If anything, I would’ve expected the opposite- that independents are capable of thinking for themselves instead of following the party line.
First, a quick review of the data. I used two GSS variables, PARTYID and POLVIEWS, and limited the sample to non-Hispanic whites after the year 2000. I removed those of "Other party" as well. Finally, I crossed that against vocab score results, which correlates with intelligence with a value of 0.70. It is rather obvious that middle-of-the-roaders are not as bright:
WORDSUM SCORE
0-2345678910
Strong Dem1581391012141520
Dem172414151513141515
Lean Dem1198111111101814
Independent262323211816141111
Lean Repub1081210812131012
Repub152118212120181613
Strong Repub6811131816161615
Extreme Liberal532214347
Liberal51166812101620
Lean ...
