In case you missed it, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump boldly asked a crowd of Iowans on the campaign trail last week, “How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country?”
Trump was expressing incredulity over the increasing popularity of Ben Carson, who represents his top threat for the GOP nomination and who recently leapfrogged the billionaire businessman in the polls in Iowa.
Never one to pass up an opportunity to crunch data and produce a color-coded map, the Washington Post then set out to fact check Trump’s comment — if that’s the right way to characterize it — and answer the question of how stupid the people of the country are.
“This is necessarily hard to figure out, of course, given that ‘stupid’ is inherently contextual and subjective,” Post political writer Philip Bump wrote, in part. “In order to figure out how smart each state was, we looked at objective measures we had at our disposal.”
The Post used IQ rates, SAT and ACT scores, and the percentages of college graduates to create an amalgamated “intelligence score” for each state.
You can view the map and a sortable chart of the data used by clicking here.
When all was said and done, the Post ranked Maine No. 19 nationwide in terms of its “intelligence score.” That’s not bad — among the top half of all states. But as is often the case whenever SAT scores are used to rank states against each other, this approach places Maine misleadingly low.
Maine’s SAT scores were worse than all but just two other states, and dragged down what were high rankings in all the other criteria used.
But as we’ve written before, Maine has long required all of its students to take the college-prep SATs, while in most states, only high schoolers with college aspirations take the test.
That naturally drives down Maine’s average SAT scores relative to other states, but doesn’t necessarily mean Maine’s college-bound students are performing any worse than other states’ college-bound students.
Meanwhile, Maine was found to be No. 4 in the country in ACT scores, No. 6 in the country in terms of IQ and a decent, middle-of-the-pack No. 23 in percentage of college graduates.
Without re-running the Washington Post formula across all 50 states, it’s tough to know where Maine would have ranked if SAT scores were removed from the equation or somehow quantified to acknowledge the higher participation percentage, but it’s safe to say the Pine Tree State would’ve been higher up on the list, and may have even cracked the top 10.
To be fair, the Post’s Bump recognized that there would be biases in the data used for the exercise, and offered it as a broad statistical analysis, not a definitive ranking of how smart people in different states are.
“Given how hard it is to identify objective metrics of intelligence, we worked with what we had,” he wrote.
By those metrics, the Post found Massachusetts to be the smartest state, followed by Minnesota, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Wisconsin. The states at the bottom of the list were Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Nevada and Hawaii. In fact, if you look at the Washington Post’s resultant color-coded map, you’ll find that the Missouri Compromise line that generally divided the Northern states from the Southern states during the Civil War approximately divides the higher scoring states from the lower scoring ones, at least using this scoring system.
