I think there's always been a segment of the intellectual elite that supported Democrats, read NY Times archives from the early twentieth century for an example of it. Support for the League of Nations was very much an elite cause.
Yeah, for an advanced Civil War & Reconstruction class I took as an elective during my senior year of college, we had to read the book
Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War by Bruce Levine. I think it is back at my parents' house, but I remember a couple of interesting passages quoting Democratic newspapers describing the Republican Party. IMHO, the tone and arrogance sounded pretty similar to today, describing a business elite that riled up a base of religious fanatics hungry for war. This is obviously just one man's words in the quote, but it was a newspaper from New York talking about how dumb and "jingoy" many of the Republicans in Congress sounded with their hyperbole about ~the Union~ and framing their views as God's will.
This is to say nothing of the many historical primary sources that describe Jefferson and his buddies as practically indistinguishable from how many modern conservatives describe "liberal elites" (i.e., snobby wannabe radicals pretty far up their own asses). Regardless, by at least the late Nineteenth Century, there was clearly a strong "intellectual" component of the Democratic Party. People always focus too much on them being the "party of the working class" or whatever, but you could very easily they still are today (at least for minorities, who are disproportionately working class), and that obviously doesn't stop them from also being viewed in a nearly opposite light when it comes to "the media and intellectuals" and their support for the party.
