ZenMode
Honored Member
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I think education, not necessarily formal/college, can help with some things. For example, if you are educated on the ins and outs of voting, I think you are less likely to believe in The Steal. If you are educated or employed in a medical industry, you are probably less likely to be an anti-vaxxer.I dunno. I know plenty of lawyers who support Trump and they are not idiots, and unfortunately I know some Harris supporters who are absolute morons. There are plenty of people on both sides of the aisle who have a reasonable basis for supporting one side or the other due to whatever issues are most dear to them, but tend to be tribal about sticking with a side regardless of obvious flaws in a particular candidate. There are others who see the flaws and simply do not care -- they are aching for that upper class tax cut, for instance (to paraphrase Krusty the Clown), or have deeply based and genuine opposition to abortion, say, or believe that LGBTQ rights are more important than anything else and they would rather have a corrupt leader who agrees with them.
I think it is counter-productive to assume or insist that everyone who disagrees with you politically is just stupid or mislead. Plenty of people are just as baffled by support of Kamala Harris as I am by support of Trump. I mean, sure, they're wrong about plenty of stuff, in my opinion, but that doesn't make them dumb. Frankly, in America, if you don't get the votes of stupid people, you are going to lose in a landslide. But the range of intelligence of people supporting one side or the other runs the entire spectrum on both sides of the divide. Yes, there is an increasing concentration of educated voters on the Democratic side of the equation currently, but that has ebbed and flowed over the years as educated voters generally tend to flee from populist politics. And there are PLENTY of really bright people without college degrees and plenty of abject idiots with college degrees.
Beyond that, it's really a crap shoot. Kind of like being religious, and believing everything associated with religions, it really ends up being out of the control of each individual person. It could be how you were raised. It could be that, on your first trek into cable news, you happened to pick Fox over CNN. It could be an influential person in your life that inadvertently shaped your initial political views. The number of external influences, that shapes us, are virtually limitless, but I don't believe intelligence is necessarily a big factor.