A yankee leftist acquaintance of mine sent me an email shortly after the election telling me that before I gloat about Bush’s victory (I replied that my candidate, the Libertarian, lost too), I might find the attached chart of interest–he attached that chart showing IQ by red and blue state. The chart is pretty striking in that the average IQ of almost every red state is below that of the blue states. No doubt this is intended to show that Democrats are smarter than Republicans. I suppose it was widely circulated by all the miffed liberals–“we may have lost, but at least we are smarter,” they must be thinking. (BTW, there’s a fairly plausible argument by Steve Sailer that Kerry is slightly dumber than Bush is.)
What is hypocritical about this chart is that it is circulated by the same people who bristled at Charles Murray’s comments about race and IQ in The Bell Curve. Coda: a reader sent me a link to The 2004 IQ Wars: So Much For The Candidates—What About The Voters?, where Sailer makes the hypocrisy point at greater length.