United Liberty

While surfing the web this weekend after getting from home BlogConCLT, I came across this story at The Daily Caller, claiming that a new poll from Pew Research shows that Republicans are more open-minded and more informed than Democrats:

Yet another new survey shows that Republican supporters know more about politics and political history than Democrats.

On eight of 13 questions about politics, Republicans outscored Democrats by an average of 18 percentage points, according to a new Pew survey titled “Partisan Differences in Knowledge.”

The Pew survey adds to a wave of surveys and studies showing that GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

“Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey, as is typically the case in surveys about political knowledge,” said the study, which noted that Democrats outscored Republicans on five questions by an average of 4.6 percent.

The widest partisan gap in the survey came in at 30 points when only 46 percent of Democrats — but 76 percent of Republicans —- correctly described the GOP as “the party generally more supportive of reducing the size of federal government.”

I spent the weekend in Charlotte chatting with some great people, however, I also heard several people making fun of libertarians and cracking jokes about how Barack Obama, as a small child, once tried dog meat — as if that is going to matter to voters in the fall. So I’m inclined to chuckle at the notion that Republicans are “open-minded.”