Verification of Bush State Stereotypes

What characterizes states that vote for George W. Bush?

An analysis of voting patterns reveals that their populations tend to:

1. Lack a college education
   
2. Be White
   
3. Be obese
   
4. Shop at Walmart
   

frequently asked questions, including what does all this mean? and you're an asshole, aren't you?

Is intelligence correlated with voting for Kerry?
(Answer: Yes)

This thesis topic has been discussed as a "hoax" in the Economist, a leading British newsmagazine. So I decided to run the statistics myself. It is not a hoax, and you can verify my results in a couple of minutes, or do it yourself in a couple of hours.
• The graphs below correlate educational attainment versus voting behavior. "Educational attainment" means the percentage of people who graduated high school or college in a state. "Voting behavior" in this context means the percentage of people in a state who voted for Kerry.
• The theory is that educational attainment is a proxy for intelligence (or perhaps more accurately, for wisdom), and that therefore, if the thesis is true, then higher educational attainment will correlate with higher voting rates for Kerry.
• On a state-by-state basis, this is unambiguously true. The higher the education level in a state, the more likely that state was to vote for Kerry in 2004. Specifically:
• -0.01 High School correlation: There is no correlation between getting a high-school degree and voting behavior. This is the reason people have called the Economist article a hoax. It just means the Economist did not look at enough data -- probably because almost everyone gets a high school degree these days. I consider the hoax outline and hoax analysis to be flawed because IQ measured in grade school is irrelevant to adult voting behavior -- the measurement is made too early and should not be done on IQ per se. Intelligence measured later in life, by academic accompishment, is a better measurement and DOES correlate with voting behavior.