I made a comment to the effect that political moderation tends to correlate with lower intelligence when looking over survey data on attitudes toward unpopular speech. This assertion didn't come out of a vacuum, when mining the GSS there were repeated indications that moderates were somewhat stupider than they should be. But here's the WORDSUM scores for whites separated into moderate vs. non-moderate classes (liberals & conservatives aggregated in the second).
But of course you want to control for education!
As you can see, even controlling for graduate degree or high school attainment moderates are less intelligent on average. When I did a regression where I put the moderates into a center-to-left analysis and another center-to-right, with the two independent variables as DEGREE (educational attainment) and POLVIEWS (political ideology on a 1-7 scale, liberal to conservative), the former was a much larger effect predictor of WORDSUM than the latter. This ...
