Elites or Masses?

One popular view of the 2016 election is that liberal elites drove voters away by lack of respect--here is a recent story .  This is not a new idea--back in the infancy of this blog (October 2010) I had a post inspired by a New York Times story entitled "Elitism:  the Charge Obama Can't Shake."  At that time, I found very few survey questions that mentioned elites or elitism.  Despite the amount of discussion of the subject, few additional ones have appeared, and I haven't found any from the 2016 election (although there was one on respect for various kinds of people, which I discuss in this post). 

However, I recently discovered one from a Fox News poll from October 2008:  "Thinking about your friends and neighbors, would they consider themselves to be part of the top elite in this country or are they part of a group that the elites in America look down upon?"  17% said part of the elite, 41% part of the group that the elites look down on, 22% gave answers that were described as "mix/depends" and 20% said they didn't know.  I found a report  that breaks it down by party identification:

                                    Elite            Despised      Depends/DK           
Democrat                     18%             44%              38%
Republican                   19%             37%             44%
Independent                 13%             44%              43%

In the sample, Republicans were most likely to think their friends were in the "top elite," and least likely to think they were in the group that elites looked down on, although none of the differences were statistically significant.  This does not fit with the usual story about Republican resentment of what liberal elitism.  The number of don't know and other answers is also noteworthy--it's unusual for 40% of people to say they don't know or volunteer another response, and suggests that the question didn't make sense to a lot of people.  (Maybe this is why they never repeated the it). 

I have a hypothesis:  that resentment about the lack of respect from liberal elites is strong not in the general public, or in the working class, but in conservative elites.  Most people don't know about the story in the latest issue of the New Yorker, or the recent incident at the University of ******, and wouldn't care very much if they did.  Conservative elites know and care.  The question is whether this sentiment is limited to a small group--a real elite--or whether some of it has filtered down to the larger group of college-educated conservatives.  Unfortunately, the original data don't seem to be available.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]