There are leftists who have MENSA-level IQs – I’ve met a couple (also, many such conservatives). One’s political orientation has less to do with that and more to do with a utilitarian ethics vs. deontological ethics – which is determined based on a combination of a person’s genes and their environment. It’s not an exact science, but it is based on numerous psychological studies – many of which I covered in (extremely liberal) college.
A person who is guided by utilitarian ethics will consider that the end justifies the means, so they would favor mercy-killing a person they love who is in pain with an incurable illness out of compassion even if that person didn’t in any way indicate to them that they wanted to die, and the rationalization would be thinking that not being in pain anymore is what’s best for them and that they know what’s best for their loved one because they love them. They would think that their loved one would understand and appreciate those actions if they could see it from their POV.
In the same situation, a deontological person would sacrifice the quality of his or her own life and prolong the increasingly-difficult life of their loved one as long as possible, and they would be highly hesitant (often being completely closed to even showing to consider the idea) to mercy-kill the loved one even if the loved one begged them to do that for them, and the deontological person would continue looking for an alternate, yet more difficult solution, such as desperate attempts at curing the terminal illness and continuing to try and minimize their suffering (the opposite of a utilitarian). Matters of life and death are the clearest examples of the difference between the utilitarian mindset and the deontological mindset.
Another example is the issue of abortion. A utilitarian person (always siding with logical pragmatism) would hardly give a second thought to the rationalization that would have them abort an unplanned child to minimize potential negative effects that having a child unprepared would potentially have on the child over the course of the child’s life. A utilitarian person would also not think there to be any fundamental difference or uniqueness worth considering between the child they are currently carrying and a child they (or their spouse) might carry in the future – other than the fact that one is statistically more likely to succeed or be happy by measurable metrics than the other.
This while a deontological person would favor sacrificing the quality of their own life and the potential quality of the type of future a child of theirs might have, being brought into the world and then raised by them without meeting a pre-conceptualized threshold level of preparedness.
According to a utilitarian mindset – there is no inherent value in a life other than the value that circumstantial environmental factors bestow upon the life – such as either the threshold level of perceived preparedness of the parents when it comes to the issue of abortion, or weighing the calculated amount of happiness vs. unhappiness caused by a life (the child) to him or herself, or to the observer (to the utilitarian person – the parent making the decision).
IMO the terms “utilitarian” and “deontological” can be interchangeably used with “liberal-thinking” and “conservative-thinking” as we understand those terms in the context of today’s political environment.
Here are some articles if you want to read up on utilitarian vs. deontological mindsets:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4778182
I found this libertarian take on different forms of morality worthwhile:
Getting Good Results vs Doing the Right Thing
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