Here's the thing: if you're going to start looking for challenging opinions, it's best to start in places other than talk radio and television news. Stop dismissing credentials. Stop vilifying academic research. Stop rewarding people who are merely controversial, or who play on petty emotional impulses or thinly-veiled bigotry.
Start rewarding depth of analysis, argument and complexity, because the world is a complicated place, full of colors and shades of gray, and no sound bite can possibly encompass it all.
Err, isn't this the opposite of what you should be doing? Credentials are cached judgements of merit; bypass the cache and judge the merit of the arguments for yourself.
As for the study, I find it silly.
For any sufficiently complicated subject, your average person lacks the knowledge, experience or intelligence to weigh arguments solely on their merits. It isn't popular to say here to a bunch of opinionated techies, but credentials are a way of bypassing limitations in our own knowledge.
Said another way: there are subjects that must be learned through experience. I am more inclined to believe the opinions of a World Bank economist than I am to believe the comments of JoeThePlumber123456 in some online libertarian forum.
These principles may not give consistent guidance with respect to the article under discussion. Isn't that what we're talking about? Maybe we should stop pretending that unobjectionable generalities actually advance the discussion. (Except that one -- it's the only one allowed :-P)
Isn't one of the key points of the conservative movement that there's no correlation between smart/stupid/good/evil/judgement/etc and intelligence/iq/g/cognitive-ability/etc? And isn't it a pretty good point? Haven't you seen Forest Gump?
Is it really controversial that the highly educated and intelligent segments of society are massively less conservative than the less educated and less intelligent segments? Come on.
Is there any evidence that the "smart people" make better political decisions? No. Anyone claiming so would be an idiot. But who's claiming that?
"I'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard." -- William F. Buckley Jr.
I don't know what the "intelligent segments" are. People with masters in liberal arts? Let's just pretend earnings power is proxy for smarts.
The top slice of earners skew liberal -- the top 3% or so, who largely owe their earnings power to government granted cartels like the AMA, the bar, and Wall Street banking. They tend to live in urban enclaves where their wealth isolates them from meaningful impacts from social legislation. They aren't personally affected by immigration policy, for example.
The much larger mass of upper middle-class types that cumulatively earn most of the money and run the country (the $150K households scattered all over, not just in the coastal urban centers) skew conservative. Entrepreneurs also skew conservative.
To a certain extent, you have business people who build things of value vs. the heavily government entwined priesthoods. The "mandarin classes", if you will, skew liberal. The merchant and tradesman classes skew conservative.
Intelligent: capable of graduating from MIT.
Educated: studied liberal arts & sciences at any credible college or university.
Conservative: Pat Buchanan. "god and country." Not Milton Friedman. Not Irving Kristol. And not "right-wing", which is an ideology. Conservative might really mean Edmund Burke, but I think the linked article means Pat Buchanan.
Smart: is context dependent and means making the best decisions in a given context. In some forms of human endeavor being smart requires higher than average intelligence, like say being a surgeon. But most aren't especially aided by intelligence. Definitely not politics or business. Too much intelligence can even cause stupidity in some situations.
I'm not sure what the word liberal means to you, but to me, in this context, it's meaningless.
Citations, data please?