Cognitively challenged Trump voter
Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty

During the 2016 election, Donald Trump famously proclaimed “I love the poorly educated!” Well, if “poorly educated” is a euphemism for “cognitively challenged,” new research finds they loved him right back.

It reports Trump voters, on average, performed more poorly than Hillary Clintonsupporters on a standard test widely regarded as a good indicator of intellectual ability.

“Intellectual factors played an important role in the 2016 election,” writes a research team led by Yoav Ganzach of Tel Aviv University. “These results suggest that the 2016 U.S. presidential election had less to do with party affiliation, income, or education, and more to do with basic cognitive ability.”

In the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Ganzach and his colleagues analyzed data from the American National Election Studies, which included 5,914 participants in 2012 and 4,271 in 2016.

Besides expressing their attitudes toward that year’s presidential candidates, participants took a standard test of verbal ability. Specifically, they were presented with 10 sets of words, and asked “to identify […]