Kagan/Sotomayor/Ginsburg/Breyer's views are so violently opposed to those of Thomas/Gorsuch that if one group is not considered extreme, the other group must be. Thomas and Ginsburg only agree (in part or in full) 62% of the time. That percentage is absolutely awful if you consider what the job of a Justice is supposed to be.
Thomas is just a Republican partisan. That's a big portion of the country so not something I'd call radical. We'll see about Gorsuch, but I expect the same (he'll come up with smart ideas for why whatever the party wants is good from a legal perspective). Note that Scalia recommended Kagan by name.
I realized about mid-way through that we will not be able to resolve this dispute. Basically, my view is that
1. The major goal of education is to develop critical thinking. So "educated person" really means "good critical thinker with some basic knowledge".
2. Critical thinkers are going to be 90+% independent. The remaining will break slightly D.
1. I said "people with advanced degrees," meaning Masters or above. But aside from that, I agree with 1, which is why I don't endorse the restricted view you put forth.
2. Not really. "Independent" voters are either partisans who don't want the label (about 8%-10% of self-identified Rs and Ds will vote the other way in elections, which is about the same as "R/D-leaning independents") or people who don't follow politics. Someone with a coherent worldview who follows the issues will have a clear, consistent preference. In another thread, I posted a poll on that came with a test. It showed that the highly educated were more likely to be liberal than the general public (and far more likely to be liberal than conservative), but they were actually pulling from the "inconsistent" pile rather than the conservative pile.
A lot of "scientists" are not good at critical thinking (I used to work in a prestigious lab at a prestigious medical school and met plenty of this type), and the degree mills are churning out an ever higher percentage of people who are horrible at critical thinking. But then Pew/Gallup/whatever is not going to have data broken down by critical thinking ability and so we might as well drop it.
"A lot of (X large group) are (Y)" is pretty much a universally true statement.
I think the point I made about taxation really explains it. Right-wingers tend to support policy that they think is *right* rather than that they think will have good results, and then they tend to make poor arguments after the fact (that is, after forming positions) for why that policy will also have good results. That tends to turn off more critical thinkers.
If right-wingers were just honest--"I think taxation is immoral and I fear that climate-change concern will lead to increased taxation" rather than "climate change is a hoax"--they'd be more effective with critical thinkers (though less effective with the general public).