Thursday, October 27, 2016

Basic Stupidity Rate Update

I started assembling and writing blogs nine years ago (on 28 September 2007 to be exact). After I'd been doing it awhile, I decided to use information sources available on the Internet invented by Al Gore to compute a national Basic Stupidity Rate (BSR), providing a baseline for interpreting the significance of various public opinion polls.

I realized that a national BSR could be mathematically calculated by simply averaging the percentages of the popular vote the Republican candidate received in each presidential election starting with Bush vs Gore in 2000. After I made the intial NBSR calculation, I realized the same procedure could be used for individual states, and I could estimate the level of fundamental stupidity in Texas compared to the entire country.

The 2016 election is coming up in 12 days, and a few weeks after that, it'll be time to update the BSRs for the United States and Texas. Based on what polls are indicating today, there's a chance that Donald Trump's candidacy may have a net effect of lowering the national BSR a little bit. We'll have to wait and see.

Basic Stupidity Rate data currently on file is as follows:
  • 2000 election: National percentage 47.87, Texas @ 59.30
  • 2004 election: National percentage 50.73, Texas @ 61.09
  • 2008 election: National percentage 45.65, Texas @ 55.45
  • 2012 election:  National percentage 47.20, Texas @ 57.17
  • Present National BSR @ 47.862 percent
  • Present Texas BSR @ 58.252 percent  
Based on the data, I expect at least 47.862 percent of those responding to poll questions will be on the wrong side of any issue because they're basically stupid. For example, Barack Obama should never achieve a job approval rate higher than 50.1 percent, allowing for 47.862 percent national stupidity, and another two percent for the usual undecideds (so uninformed they're unable to offer an opinion). If Obama hits 51-52 percent approval, he's overachieving.

Based on the state data, stupidity in Texas is 10.4 percent more common than in the nation as a whole. As Trump would say, so sad.

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