An overwhelming majority of potential New Hampshire GOP primary voters believe Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is plenty qualified to be president even without a college degree.
According to an NH1 New Hampshire poll, “85 percent of Republicans and independents likely to vote in next year’s GOP presidential primary say it doesn’t matter that Walker didn’t graduate college, and that he’s qualified to be the next president.” The poll found that “fifteen percent of those questioned say the lack of a college degree should disqualify Walker from serving in the White House.”
As NH1 noted, Walker, who has been leading in some early polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, “left Marquette University in the spring of his senior year to start a job with the American Red Cross,” and “if elected to the White House, he’d be the first president without a bachelor’s degree in more than 60 years.”
Insecure observers, pundits, and journalists in the permanent political class who, in a shallow manner, obsess about where people went to school, though, keep bringing up the issue. So have some Democrats. After former Vermont Governor Howard Dean (D) questioned “how well educated” Walker was last week on MSNBC, Walker blasted the “elitist” attitudes of his critics.
In an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Walker said he went to “college not only to get an education” but to ultimately get a job and jumped at the Red Cross job opportunity. He said he meant to go back to school but got married, had children and before he knew it all of his time and money were going to his family.
Walker said that though he does not have a Ph.D. or a law degree from Ivy League schools, he hoped that voters would see his results reforming government against unions and left-wing interests.
“I hope they’ve seen that my results… show I got a graduate degree in taking on the big-government special interests,” he told Baier.
In 2014, Walker touted his “UW Flexible Degree” proposal and indicated that he would like to one day complete his degree through the program, which “will allow adults to start classes anytime, work at their own pace, and earn credit for what they already have learned in school or on the job once they prove college-level competencies.”
The NH1 poll was conducted Wednesday and has a margin of error is +/- 3.85 percentage points.
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