True. But I tend to think education is more important than raw intellectual horsepower when it comes to making rational political decisions.
Without a basic understanding of history, civics, and economics, even a brilliant voter won’t have the contextual knowledge required to distinguish good policies from bad ones. A lot of political reasoning is of the database search variety. You compare policy proposals to a mental database of things that have been tried in the past and their corresponding outcomes. We don’t resist communism because we run some thought experiment every time we consider it - instead, we conjur up all the examples of communist nations and recoil at what we know are the real world results. The same thing happens with morons who interpret every social welfare program as “socialism.” They instantly associate such policies with historical communist failures. The problem is that they aren’t educated enough to understand the substantive differences between modern European style welfare and Soviet communism.
That’s why “otherwise intelligent” is such a common trope in any MAGA encounter story you’ll read here. Too many bright Americans have been spoonfed bullshit propaganda instead of a real education in history and economics.
Hell, you see it every day on the Israel thread. Numerous bright and otherwise well-educated left-leaning posters have a huge blind spot when it comes to the history of that conflict, which causes them to spout idiotic shit.