Are the elites more polarized? Yes!

One of the argument from Andrew Gelman’s Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State which has percolated into the punditocracy is that the Culture Wars are to a large extent a feature of the upper socioeconomic brackets. Gelman presents data which strongly contradicts Thomas Frank’s argument that the less wealthy are voting based on cultural issues as opposed to their economic self-interest. Rather, it seems that the wealthier are voting on social issues because at a particular level of affluence economic concerns have less salience. Mainstream pundits such as Matt Yglesias and Matt Continetti have been repeating Gelman’s claim to the point where I think we might finally be able to bury Frankism.
Since Andrew Gelman wrote a whole book on the topic, I assume he knows what he’s talking about (he also reports a lot of the data and analysis on his weblog). But I decided to look at political ideology as a function of socioeconomic status in the GSS. Specifically, I broke down the “SEI” (socioeconomic index) into quartiles. I compared it to the “POLVIEWS” variable, which measures political ideology on a 1-7 scale, from extremely liberal, to extremely conservative, with a 4 being moderate. Limiting the sample to whites here is the chart of mean political ideology as a function of socioeconomic quartile (lowest to highest, left to right):

Though there is a slight shift toward more conservatism in the middle socioeconomic quartiles, it is minimal. On the whole the mean value of political orientation remains pretty much the same across the socioeconomic spectrum. The top 25^th are are neither limousine liberals nor conservative fatcats, or, they are, but to an equally greater extent.
Means only give you so much. You want to know how things are distributed across the spectrum, so now let’s break down by all 7 political categories:

Now on the Y axis you have the percentages, while on the X axis you still have the socioeconomic quartiles. Though those on the political extremes (those who cop to being an extreme liberal or conservative) don’t gain much the socioeconomic scale, but moderation does yield to liberalism and conservatism.