I was feeling just snarky enough that I jumped immediately to the conclusion that people in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California must just be smarter than everyone else. Er, except New Yorkers.
However, I decided to be fair and test the hypothesis. My hunt for statistics netted me a data set produced by Morgan Quitno Press, which is lately become a subsidiary of the Congressional Review. It aggregates twenty-one different measures of the effectiveness of education in each state, and ranks the states according to which is "smartest."
Massachusetts and Connecticut, as I predicted, rank second and third respectively. California has not done so well. Of course California is a big compost heap of a state and I suspect its smartness is extremely regionalized. Curiously, Vermont and New Jersey, both of which have Civil Union laws, rank first and fourth.
So smart people are more liberal?
There is a correlation between how smart a state is and whether it is colored red or blue on the New York Times electoral map. I have grouped together states according to the Times's categories and predicted outcomes--Solid Obama, Leaning Obama, Tossup, Leaning McCain, and Solid McCain--and calculated average smartness scores for each group, expressed as a GPA.
| Outcome | GPA |
| Solid Obama | 2.36 |
| Leaning Obama | 2.14 |
| Tossup | 1.87 |
| Leaning McCain | 2.27 |
| Solid McCain | 1.60 |
The correlation is not perfect but I'm satisfied. I do wish we were doing better than a C+, though.
Arizona, John McCain's state, comes in last at number 50, though to be fair, Barack Obama's Illinois, at number 35 is not doing a whole lot better. Maybe that's why Obama had to sit through meetings with Bill Ayres.
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