It's almost inevitable that somebody's mentioned it already, but this subject is covered in Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction" (1979, I think). The book's about sociology and specifically examines France, but the dynamics he describes aren't dissimilar from the rest of the Western world, and they haven't changed all that much since the time the book was written (obviously the content people consume has changed, but the way art functions in different ways remains the same).
I'm currently in the process of reading it, but from what I understand so far, Bourdieu is essentially arguing that "high art" is art that has been ascribed more cultural value, and being linked to level of education and social origin, the "
cultural capital" attained through its consumption and comprehension is used to distinguish class, as art serves different functions for different factions of society (for example, dance music in clubs is just designed for people to have a good knees-up, whereas consumers of contemporary classical music might be primarily concerned with aesthetic).
Bourdieu seems to have found that the bourgeoisie were more able to identify classical music with more cultural value ascribed to it (higher initial socio-economic status ensures a more extensive education which grants access to more cultural capital, so naturally somebody who went down this path of education will have seen more exposure to "high art") and were more interested in aesthetic, whereas the working man would have been more familiar with more "light" classical music which may have been less revered in terms of its cultural value (e.g. Blue Danube).
Anyway, that's my less-than-succinct take on what I've read so far, but it's an interesting topic and so far seems like a great book. It's interesting to see how the same principles apply to contemporary society, given how different the methods people use to consume art now are. With the internet, anybody with a computer can access essentially any kind of art with any kind of aesthetic. Almost anybody can access a piece of art or music on sites like Youtube, divorced from its original context, which means across practically all factions of society, aesthetic (expressed on services like iTunes and Spotify as "genre" I suppose) is the main decider as to whether or not a commodity is desirable to its consumer, rather than being a by-product that develops through its function and means of production, so I'd imagine that currently, taste in art is a little bit less of a clear indicator of cultural capital (with social origin and level of education probably being more reliable indicators - after all, it seems to me like the idea of cultural capital mainly functions to protect the status of the bourgeoisie anyway, so this would make sense to me).
EDIT: By the way, I understand the initial question was about political orientation, but I don't think political orientation and class are all that separate - obviously it's not so simple as "x" class always has "x" political views, but I think the way people identify what politics they subscribe to is linked with how they understand and identify themselves in terms of their place in society.