Maybe the show “Are Your Smarter than a 5th Grader?” should be renamed “Are You Smarter than a Democrat?” although then it wouldn’t take much effort to find contestants who could answer affirmatively. Despite their insistence that they are the more cerebral party, the donks didn’t perform especially well on the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey (GSS) in 2012. Ted Frank of the Competitive Enterprise Institute tweeted this reminder yesterday.
Why don’t Democrats believe in science? pic.twitter.com/VTCrzPOP22 https://t.co/W4IaCVq485
— tedfrank (@tedfrank) November 5, 2015
Independents and Republicans didn’t exactly knock the third-grade-level question out of the park either, but then they don’t parade around constantly beating their chest over how much brainier they are than their ideological counterparts.
If you want to see how respondents answered questions based on political affiliation, the entire GSS can be found on this page, though you may have to do some digging to find out what you’re looking for. (You can always ask one of the Einsteins on the left for assistance!)
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
A similar survey was taken the same year by the National Science Foundation. The findings were somewhat more encouraging, though 26% of the 2,200 people surveyed still answered incorrectly that “the Sun go around the Earth.”
In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that “The universe began with a huge explosion” and only 48 percent said “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”
