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This is classic social psych bullshit in a right-wing wrapper. There are two lying-with-statistics tricks going on here:
Non-standard terminology. The definition of "elite 1%" excludes the vast majority of elites who live in rich suburbs. They define elite 1% as meeting all 3 of postgraduate degree (this covers 14% of the population), household income over $150k (trivial for a two-income PMC couple in a HCOL city - two schoolteachers with masters degrees would probably qualify) and living in a zip code with a population density over 10k/square mile (only a few % of the population - looking at zipatlas.com these zip codes are mostly downtown districts, prisons and campuses with their own zip codes, NYC, and dense inner suburbs of LA.) So the most restrictive condition is the population density one, which is not a measure of eliteness - it is a proxy for alignment with the tribe Rasmussen wants to bash.
Garden of forking paths. The authors switch between "the elite 1%", "elite 1% graduates of a semi-arbitrary list of 12 schools" and "politically obsessed members of the elite 1%" as needed to make the point they are making. We don't know how many other cuts of the data they ran before they chose those ones.
Rasmussen are saying that they have surveyed the elite and found that they are out of touch with America. What they have actually done is surveyed the subset of the PMC that chooses to live in the densest 2% of zip codes, and their interns played with crosstabs until they found some subsets of that group who are, indeed, profoundly out of touch with America. This is about as meaningful as doing some vox pops with stoners in downtown Portland.
See this Arnold Kling post and comments for more details.
Apart from Manhattanites, quite the opposite. Who has more power and influence - the residents of DC or the government officials who commute in from the burbs? The people of Anaheim and Inglewood or the people of Beverley Hills? 90210 is by the definition used in this study a non-elite zip code.
Well, do the suburbs have great political power in the USA? Compared to the cities?
All civilizations concentrate around their cities, they're the most valuable real estate for a reason. The central Parisian has more influence on politics than a distant suburbanite in the banlieues, their rioting potential alone is significant. We observe that inner-city progressives have more influence on politics than their numbers or wealth alone would suggest, they have heightened access to the commanding heights of a country, the urban core where politics is done. Proximity is power.
And Manhattan is one hell of an exception to make, is New York not the most famous and important city in the US? Isn't it the quintessential American city?
In most US cities the important thing to remember about downtown is that no one lives there- there might be a few trendy high rise apartments charging above the median income in rent for a one bedroom, but aside from a few young, wealthy hipsters the people who work in those downtown office parks commute in from suburbs, blue collar ones in the case of the janitors and security guards, nice HOA ruled ones in the case of the managers and lawyers and accountants. This means no one really cares if downtowns go to shit; there’s very little additional political influence to be had by actually living there. The suburbs typically rule the inner city, not the other way around, and not-downtown inner city neighborhoods are generally quite crappy and distinctly ‘ruled’ not ‘rulers’. Indeed, ‘the inner city’ is an American euphemism for a crappy neighborhood.
NYC is the exception to every rule about America and is not, generally, very popular elsewhere in the country. It’s definitely the biggest and wealthiest metropole but using it as some kind of benchmark about the modern U.S. is questionable.
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The people of Beverley Hills are mostly rich Iranian Jewish dentists and dermatologists, the people of Anaheim are more likely to run the city.
More broadly I don’t disagree that the study is awful and clearly hacked to produce a specific result.
But it is important to delineate what we’re saying when we talk about ‘the elite’. There are New York Times opinion columnists on $130k a year who have more ‘political and cultural’ (and perhaps even economic) power than many billionaires. There are mid level bureaucrats in the State Department who have more power than foreign or even domestic lobbyists and their clients who have spent nine or perhaps even ten figures trying to make things happen. It took thirty years and billions of dollars for Silicon Valley to acquire lobbying power equivalent to those of legacy industries.
It is true that people with great political influence can usually parlay it into wealth (as the Obamas and Clintons did), and it is true that people with great wealth can buy some political influence (as Soros, the Kochs and others have). But the relationship isn’t clear, linear or guaranteed. A single academic in a top education faculty that produces teachers who will go on to work at elite private schools may well have more influence on the next generation of American elites than every billionaire on the top 20 combined.
Musk certainly has more influence compared to a single academic
Musk is the richest or second richest man in the world and spent tens of billions on media influence.
Your point?
He’s unusual even for billionaires, and I’m not sure your point is correct, Musk’s impact is immediately visible, the unknown academic’s might take decades to understand.
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