Sunday, June 5

Dumb Drivers and the 2004 Presidential Election

Recently there was a study issued that ranked states on how ‘dumb’ their drivers are. This ranking was based on the results of driving tests given to drivers in the states. I did a quick study by comparing the state rankings in driver ‘dumbness’ and how each state voted for President in the 2004 election. The results are interesting.

I separated the list into the top 25 and the bottom 24 ranked.

In the top 25:

Bush won 18 of the smarter states and Kerry only 7.
Electoral votes for Bush: 143
Electoral votes for Kerry: 62

In the bottom 24:

Both won 12 dumb states.
Electoral votes for Bush: 140
Electoral votes for Kerry: 186

There was lots of talk that Republicans in general and people who voted for Bush are dumb. This quick study would seem to indicate that Democratic Candidate John Kerry benefited more from ‘dumb’ state voters than did President Bush.

I would have loved to add the percentage of votes each candidate received in each state and how that compared to their rankings, but I think I have made my point. I will leave further analysis to the experts.

I hope to post the details in the near future once I convert the spreadsheet into PDF.
Update on 7 June 05:

You can find the state breakdown in the Powerpoint show presentation here:
Driver-voters.pps

You can find the state breakdown in the PDF here:
While both Bush and Kerry won an equal number of 'dumb' states, you can clearly see that the smarter of the dumb states went for Bush and Kerry won the eight dumbest of the dumb.
Wow, no comments?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is not surprising! Especially when I think about some of the Kerry voters I know. (I know this is long after the post, but I just saw this on the Astute Blogger "Scandal" post.)