The candidate who brags of a top-notch education does best among voters who lack it, according to the latest CNN/ORC poll.
Donald Trump is again topping the latest national survey, bolstered by Republicans who don’t have college degrees: 46% of those without a bachelor’s said they’d support him. Among college-educated conservatives, Sen. Ted Cruz leads the primary field, followed by Dr. Ben Carson, and Sen. Marco Rubio — all ranking higher than Trump, who comes in fourth place with 18% of votes.
RELATED: Trump still on top – and getting stronger
“I went to the Wharton School of Business. I’m, like, a really smart person,” Trump said in July, later describing the school on CNN as “like super genius stuff” and “the best school in the world.” He’s called his MIT-attending uncle a “genius,” boasting that “it’s my blood, I’m smart.” On “Meet the Press,” he argued that “if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I’m the super genius of all time … The super genius of all time.” In August, he boasted that “I went to an Ivy League school … that’s the kind of thinking our country needs, that mindset.”
The divide is one of the most striking examples of Trump’s gravity-defying campaign. The very people Trump sets himself apart from are the ones bolstering his presidential bid. After years of well-educated, wealthy Republican candidates striving to portray themselves as average Joes and everymans, the party’s primary voters are embracing the polar-opposite: A rich, well-educated candidate who can’t stop bragging about — and possibly overstating — his credentials.
To be clear: Trump initially attended Fordham University before transferring to the much-boasted about Ivy League University of Pennsylvania as a junior. Trump did indeed take classes at Penn’s Wharton School as an undergraduate, but he was not in the school’s prestigious MBA program. Furthermore, his routine claims about earning top marks have been disputed. Trump didn’t make the Dean’s List, according to The Daily Beast, and he wasn’t listed in the graduation program as receiving any honors of any kind, according to a 1984 New York Times Magazine article.
Still, he’s routinely dismissed his opponents for being “stupid” and a “dummy” and dismissed his rivals as not being worthy of the education he received. In 2011, he told the Associated Press the president wasn’t qualified for the Ivy League education he received.
“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” he said. “I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”
Conservative pollster John McLaughlin said Trump’s boasts about education are just another way of portraying himself as ready to be president.
RELATED: Trump pledges to release medical records showing ‘perfection’
“He knows he’s being attacked for not having government experience or being elected to public office,” said McLaughlin, who was commissioned to write a plan during the last election for how Trump could enter the race. “It’s another way to say he’s got the ability to lead the country.”
Trump’s made a campaign out of appealing to the everyman — as a rich guy who wants to make you rich, too. “My whole energy, my whole being is going to be to make this country rich. In order to make this country great, I have to make it rich again,” he said in Alabama at a rally.








