I am eventually going to get around to a post on public opinion about the 2000 election controversy--I've found some interesting things. But I was interrupted by running across a good example of something I've discussed before (most recently here)--a tendency to treat "elites" as more or less identical to the educated middle class. Tim Carney writes "It should be obvious to everyone with eyes that today’s Democratic Party
is the party of the elite. All of the wealthiest congressional
districts are represented by Democrats. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump
mostly by outperforming in upper-middle-class white suburbs. The GOP’s
strongest constituency is whites without a college degree. A quick
glance at the early data suggest Republicans’ biggest gains are among
non-whites without a college degree." The striking thing about that passage is that he provides four pieces of evidence and none of them support his claim. Congressional districts are pretty big, averaging about 800,000 people, so even the richest ones are not exclusively upper-class. And I've shown that at the county level, the presence of rich people seems to push other people towards the Democrats. So the relationship between average income and Democratic vote is interesting, but doesn't tell us that people with high incomes voted Democratic. That's a subtle point, but the next three clearly don't involve elites. You could say that that we can extrapolate, so if people of moderately high social standing are more Democratic than people of low social standing, then people with very high social standing will be even more Democratic. However, you can't put much faith in extrapolations that go way outside of the observed data; moreover, the relationship between social standing and voting is complicated. At one time, it was fairly accurate to simply say that people who ranked higher were more Democratic, but now it depends on what characteristic you're talking about: more education is associated with support for the Democrats and higher income with support for the Republicans.
Since elites are by definition a small minority, there's not much survey evidence on elite opinions, but one survey of high-income people in the Chicago area indicated that they were moderately conservative on economic issues. There are also some statistics on political donations--in 2020, 62% of people who donated $100,000 or more gave to Republicans. So the limited evidence available suggests that economic elites lean Republican. But a lot of conservatives seem to want to believe that elites support Democrats, so they don't need evidence--it's just "obvious." This leads to some data--from 1987 to 1996 several CBS/NY Times surveys asked "in general, do you think that the [Democratic/Republican] Party favors the rich, favors the middle class, favors the poor, or does it treat them all the same." After a long gap, a CBS News survey asked the question again in 2017. Here's what people who identified as Republicans said about the Republican party:
1987 1996 2017
Rich 30% 31% 12%
Middle 14% 20% 24%
Poor 0% 3% 2%
Same 50% 43% 56%
and about the Democrats:
1987 1996 2017
Rich 18% 24% 34%
Middle 13% 16% 6%
Poor 25% 36% 26%
Same 36% 17% 22%
So among Republicans, there was a shift away from seeing their party as favoring the rich and towards seeing the Democrats as favoring the rich. In 1987, more Republicans thought that the Republican party favored the rich than thought the Democrats did (30% to 18%)--in 2017, it was reversed (12% to 34%), Democrats' perceptions of the parties, in contrast, didn't change--at all three times, over 80% thought that the Republicans favored the rich, and about 75% thought that the Democrats favored the middle class or treated them all the same. Independents shifted towards seeing both parties as more interested in the rich--going from 54% to 63% on the Republicans and 14% to 36% on the Democrats.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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