According to the Pew Research Center it seems that Republican are better informed on the issues than Democrats.

You can read the results and take the quiz here. BTW I got all 12 right.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1378/political...&proj=forum
Here are the results when sorted by political affiliation.

BTW I deleted the answers. So no cheating.
Republicans knew more on 10 of the 12 issues they tied on one and the Dems scored better on only 1.

From this article I found an earlier political IQ test.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1179/economic-news-iq-quiz
I only got 11 out of 12 right because I didn't realize it was dated April 2, 2009 and I got the Dow Jones question wrong.
But even then Republicans did better than Dems.

once again I deleted the answers from the results.

"Luk mah parti iz smarterer den urs lol"

What are we supposed to be debating here?

Oh, look, I got all 12 right!

I got 9 out of 12 but two of the 3 I got wrong were the DOW and unemployment one, so really it was 11 out of 12 like you, Simon. And apparently I did better than the average American, that's kind of sad.

this doesnt surprise me one bit, thx for the confirmation!

How many did you get right?

Sounds about right. It seems that independents do overall better than both Republicans and Democrats... GO US!

After hearing all the stupidity from the street polls, I am going to have to say it sounds correct. Seriously, 3/5 people who voted for Barak Obama on this one poll thought Sarah Palin was Obama's VP pick... what. the. $%&@.

Source?

9/12

I thought I would miss more, thank you Boiler Room

Here's Your Score: You correctly answered 12 of the 12 possible questions along with approximately 2% of the public. You did better than 98% of the general public.






took me about 1 minute and 20 secs to complete it.

Good for you, you get a gold star for the day.

Oh, I didn't mean 3/5 of EVERY person voting for Obama, just the ones interviewed by Howard Stern. (I have more faith in people than that..)



I scored higher than 82% of people. That's fine by me. I just didn't know who the chairman of the Federal Reserve was. I don't know what else I got wrong.

yay!


i do keep up on the news alot.

Meh, I got all 12 of them correct and I sure as hell am not a Republican. In any event, both parties are composed of people who don't know half of what's going on in the world... nothing new.

Aaaand how many of those questions are based off of things that the GOP !@#$%*es about? Sotomayor was a big issue with reps, not dems. No reason for dems to know about Glen Beck besides that he thinks their fascist commies.

I got all of them right, that was too easy.

Seriously, aside from the exact deployment in Afghanistan, every American ought to have known the rest.

EDIT: @ Ethan Smith - Usually, the opposition is more "conscious" of issues than those supporting the establishment... you know? Those outside look for any rock to throw at the window while those inside don't want to look outside.

It's something you should know about. You should know a bit more than just what the media decides you should know.

But why should I know about Glen Beck? I would feel AWESOME had I never heard his name, and it's not like I'm less informed for having never seen his show.

I'm not quite sure how my knowledge or otherwise of who Glenn Beck is has anything to do with my knowledge of politics.

That said, it's an interesting poll. I'd like to see it repeated and see if cycling to different questions changes the results.

How are you so sure?



Yea, I agree. (oh my gawsh!) The Glenn Beck question probably does throw a few people off. Only five million listeners a day; that's not ~100 million voters.

Well I looked through his book and I'm fairly certain I have more complicated political views than his demographic. I mean, that's not a bad thing, he's 'educating' people with little time to spend on politics. It's just that there is absolutely no need for me to ever watch his show, just like there is absolutely no need for me to read a political history high school textbook as a History/Political Science double major.

Because the average person forgets what they learned in school? There were theories beat into my head in elementary school that I honestly don't remember anymore.

Yeah, that's true with me and precalculus. You forget things because you don't do them often. I have to write an essay a week on history or political topics. I'm pretty sure that I'm politically intelligent enough to not need to be pandered down to.

You have to realize that his books aren't meant for just people like you. How many lower-reading level and people with smaller attention spans would read a college-level book? It's meant for the.. politically 'young', so to speak, as well as the politically astute.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

Oh, that's good.

Glenn Beck is a medium of information (thus placing him in this "evil media" category). Not knowing about him does not mean you are misinformed on politics.

I got 11 out of 12, I missed the question on the Dow because, quite frankly, those numbers mean nothing to me. I am not a stock broker nor do I analyze stocks. Beyond that, fairly easy quiz.

The problem is we have very little intermediate stuff. After 10th grade I didn't care about politics because I thought I knew everything, because all the books were aiming at someone who wasn't as educated on the subject as I was. It wasn't until senior year, with reading Kissinger, that I got back into the field. I was actually planning on being a writer up until then.

Did you think I put the second sentence in there just for the lulz?



Personally, Glenn Beck's Common Sense bored me; it was a little too dumbed down, not to mention I am an action/mystery kinda guy. But it's like being an a really easy class: your grades can slip just because you are too bored in it.

12. Interesting to see the Repubs scoring such higher, not sure what that actually indicates.


Also interesting that a number of people apparently forgot the Democrats were in charge :/ The percentage of people who got that right went down

I simply found your second sentence ironic, because you stated that one should know and lend an ear to Glenn Beck, while at the same time demonizing "the media" and implying that no one should pay attention to their slant.

In the past, I saw polls that said otherwise. And what does it all mean? Maybe, and this is just random, when your party is in power you pay less attention to politics as you feel you're getting what you want. When your party is out of power you're enraged by the creeping fascism/communism and pay more attention to things.


Or maybe these polls are full of !@#$.

And a post after that shows that I didn't necessarily agree with the Glenn Beck question. Kinda funny isn't it?

I got all 12, that quiz was a joke.

I wonder if they got all the political affiliations from self-identifying.

I do indeed find your self-contradictions humourous.

Correlation, or not?

12/12, the only one that gave me pause was the Afghanistan troop deployment as I remembered recently about 26,000 new troops or something off the top of my head and picked 70,000.

The larger the party, the dumber the party. As soon as the gullible Democrat voters switch back to Republicans the scores will simply inverse.

I never once said I agreed with the Glenn Beck question. Please quote me where I said that it was a quality question, or that you should know your talk show hosts. I believe I said that people should know politics. You are simply taking my post out of context. Congratulations.

This argument isn't even worth pursuing any more. It seem fairly obvious you are extraordinarily averse to admitting you are incorrect, such as mis-stating a statistic and later clarifying how and why it was incorrect without taking the blame for telling, essentially, a lie hidden as a "statistic."

I won't bother. You are obviously putting words in my mouth and don't care to actually debate. GTFO, you aren't worth paying attention to.

It was a tricky one. Bush only had 20,000 in Afghanistan, while Obama raised it to 70,000 or so.

Hell, I thought it was 60,000

Dammit, that's where I remembered that number from. Uh, 11/12 here.

But the results were surprising at first, but it's a fairly well-established trend that the very poorest/uneducated go Democratic. The richest/most educated do, too.

In the exit polling from 2004 Dems got a majority of people who's highest completed level of education was elementary school and post graduate. Republicans got a majority of people who's highest completed level of education was high school, some college and college grads.

Meh, 8/12, though I had to guess with some names. Better than 75% which is pretty damn miserable considering my understanding of American politics is kind of low.

9/12. But my age group wasn't even included, I had to add 3 years!

Missed #7, 8, and 9

Also, most of this was really easy. Read the papers, bro.

8/12 = 2/3 = 66%

But that's probably better than 75% of the test takers, which is a figure the quiz gives you.

I got 10/12, messed up the A-stan number and something else.

I got 12/12. No surprise there, though.

It's obviously true that more educated a voter is the more likely he is to vote Republican, until you get to postgraduate eduction (although I wonder, and have no way of determining, whether that's just the influence of ivory tower academics. Do MDs, JDs, MBAs, and practicing PhDs vote Republican?).

Of course, the reason that this poll came out this way though is because with the GOP out of power, the only people left who self-identify are the die-hard ideologues, who tend to be really well-informed or really ignorant (this is true of both sides).

The ignorant masses have shifted to the Democrats. Which is probably why their numbers are so bad... But if the GOP takes power again, the masses will have shifted back and we'll have to hear from the usual suspects on here trumpeting some new poll which shows self-identified Republicans as less informed, and we'll have this discussion again.

12/12.

Bleh. I think JEB sums up my opinion on this fairly well on this matter, though.