I don't think the blue states are necessarily smarter but I do think they are better educated. And education does equate to different perceptions.

My father, born in 1901, had only 8 grades of formal education (although education at that time taught much more rigorous maths and other methods of cogitation) and he had a lifelong distrust of people who flaunted their college education, or even of "experts", per se.

(It took me some years before I realized that the expert, far from displaying arrogance and snobbery, was able to accomplish the things he had studied more quickly, more cheaply and with fewer false starts than the one who was reinventing the wheel, so to speak.)

'Red' states in our current experience have somewhat the same attitude toward the 'blue' as my father did toward college graduates. IMO