Two posts, when put together, suggest a possible connection.

First, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert:

With so much media attention on Scott Walker’s college record and proposed cuts to the university system, we thought we’d look at Walker’s popularity in Wisconsin by education level.

Is there an “education gap” in voter attitudes toward the second-term governor and likely presidential candidate?

Are there any differences among high-school graduates, college graduates and voters with graduate degrees when it comes to their views of Walker?

It turns out there are some, but the pattern varies by political party, according to a review of three years’ worth of Wisconsin polling by theMarquette Law School, which has surveyed more than 22,000 registered voters since January of 2012.

For example, Walker’s favorability rating is sky-high among Republican voters across all education levels.  But it is slightly lower (85%) among Republicans with post-graduate degrees than among Republicans who have spent some time in college (89%) or have B.A.’s (91%).

Looking at independents, Walker’s popularity is also lower among voters with graduate degrees (41%) than it is among those at all other education levels (about 50%).

But the clearest pattern is found with Democratic voters.

Walker’s popularity is low across the board with Democrats.  But the more educated Democrats are, the more negative they are about Walker.

Since 2012, the governor’s favorability rating is 18% among Democrats with a high school education or less, 16% among Democrats with some college or an associate’s degree, 11% among Democrats with a B.A., and just 6% among Democrats with a post-graduate degree.

Charles Franklin, who conducts the Marquette Law School poll and provided the survey data, did a further analysis isolating the influence of education by controlling for race, age, gender and even ideology (whether a voter is conservative, liberal or moderate).

It confirmed that the education gap over Walker is biggest with Democrats, is smaller among independents, and is very small among Republicans.

“Among independents and Republicans, Walker draws support fairly evenly among (those with) high school, some college and those who completed four years of college. There is some drop-off among those with a post-graduate education,” says Franklin. “But for Democrats there is a steady decline of support as education rises.”

Next, Mark Cunningham:

The GOP 2016 pack is off on a 16-month war for the nomination, which means performing for the party’s base and the money men. Yet whoever comes out on top won’t take the White House unless he starts now on connecting with an entirely different class of people.

They’re the voters who didn’t come out for John McCain in 2008, and mostly not for Mitt Romney in 2012: They’re middle- and working-class — mostly men and mostly white, though some minority voters and women will respond to the same appeal.

When these voters have come out for the GOP, it’s seen congressional landslides like 1994, 2010 and ’14 — but no national Republican since Ronald Reagan has fully drawn them in.

In ’94, liberals sneered about “angry white men.” OK, but the anger is because these folks have seen their ability to provide for a family under assault for decades, by everything from economic change to politics.

They know they’re losing, not gaining, when Democrats “spread the wealth” — but they need reason to believe a Republican will fight for them. …

You’re all for college, but you don’t think the only good-paying jobs should be for college grads. Too many Americans are stuck with a choice between getting work as a Wal-Mart greeter or seeing if they can make a disability claim stick.

About college: Something’s badly wrong there. We’re graduating too many kids with $100,000 in debt and no skills to earn enough to pay it back. While the rest of America is busy doing more with less, these schools keep on paying way too much money to way too many people who don’t even teach.

It’s time to put strings on the billions Washington sends to higher education, demanding that these schools deliver value.

Blue collar? Working class? Well, consider that 73.2 percent of Wisconsinites, and 71.8 percent of Americans, do not have a four-year college degree, according to the U.S. Census.

Consider as well that the average teacher salary in Wisconsin (not counting the value of their benefits) is $53,797, according to TeacherPortal.com, while the median Wisconsin family income is $52,413, again according to the U.S. Census.

Rich Lowry:

Scott Walker belongs to an embattled minority that happens to be most of the population. The root of this paradox is that Walker is an extreme outlier among top elected officials — and the journalists and consultants who surround them — in not having graduated from college, at the same time that a solid two-thirds of the country lacks a four-year degree.

Such is the domination of not just college grads, but specifically Ivy League grads and especially Harvard grads, at the upper echelons of our government that the nation’s political competition can be seen as one big intramural battle at the Harvard Club.

George W. Bush (Harvard Business School, 1975) was succeeded as president by Barack Obama (Harvard Law, 1991), whose fiercest tea party critic is perhaps Ted Cruz (Harvard Law, 1995).

Should Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton get elected president she will at least provide a dollop of diversity (Yale Law School, 1973) and restore to New Haven what had once appeared to be its ascendancy, running from George H.W. Bush (Yale, 1948) to Bill Clinton (Yale Law School, 1973) to the double-credentialed George W. Bush (Yale, 1968).

For someone from a state school to try to break this glass ceiling would seem formidable enough, let alone someone like Walker, who dropped out of Marquette in 1990.

For all that we celebrate the do-it-my-own-way pluck and creativity of the nation’s great entrepreneurs who didn’t graduate, we tend to consider a four-year degree an indispensable stamp of respectability and capability. It shouldn’t be.

Walker’s example, as the man who has been elected governor of Wisconsin three times and is at or near the top of Republican polls for president, stands for an important point: Success in American shouldn’t have to go through a B.A.

This is something that the nation’s elite has trouble grasping. Howard Dean (Yale, 1971) expressed the liberal id on this question the other day on “Morning Joe.” Discussing the flare-up over Walker ducking a question on evolution in London last week, Dean said “the issue is how well-educated is this guy? And that’s a problem.”

When Joe Scarborough pushed back at him for calling Walker dumb, Dean clarified, “I didn’t say dumb, I said unknowledgable.” Oh.

The Washington Post ran a piece last week headlined, “As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit,” although no questions linger over his college exit. He left to take a full-time job with the American Red Cross. Mystery solved.

The dirt, such as it is, from the Post report is that Walker “had trouble showing up on time for French” and was completely bored in “a class on the politics of the Third World.” Can we at least contemplate the possibility that the class on Third World was genuinely boring? The Post characterizes Walker’s failure to graduate as one of “a string of defeats” he suffered at the time, yet the defeat was simply getting on with his life.

Do we really believe that Scott Walker would be any more or less impressive if he had — to choose from some of Marquette’s current course offerings — finished up his final credits by acing such classes as Economic and Social Aspects of Film, Sociology of Gender and Sex, and Principles of Peer Facilitation Among College Students?

Perhaps, if he had been more diligent in his studies, he would derive great pleasure from being able to read Flaubert in the original and discuss with fluidity the 1966 coup in Nigeria that brought to power Maj. Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi. But clearly none of this interested him, as indeed it wouldn’t interest anyone but the most devoted Francophiles or Africanists.

As a practical matter, Walker used college as vocational education for what was his true passion: politics. He told John McCormack of The Weekly Standard that attending Boys State and Boys Nation during high school fueled his interest in running for office. So he took up political science. But studying political science has about as much bearing on becoming a politician as studying marine biology does on becoming an Olympic diver.

There are professions, becoming a lawyer or doctor, that require years of postsecondary education. Being a politician — or, ahem, a journalist — aren’t among them. These are things you primarily learn by doing. Walker ran for student office repeatedly at Marquette, then for real office almost as soon as he left school, steadily building a career that has made him more successful and influential than world-class political science Ph.D.s.

We shouldn’t overlearn from Scott Walker’s example, of course. For many people, it’s better to graduate from college than not. But not for everybody. It would make more sense if we had a postsecondary system that had ways of training and credentialing young people that wasn’t so overwhelmingly dependent on a four-year degree, which is controlled by a lazy, inefficient and tuition-hiking academic establishment.

Walker’s proposed 13 percent reduction in funding for the University of Wisconsin system is being linked by some commentators to his own college experience, making him an “antagonist of the academy,” in the words of an article for Inside Higher Ed. But the Walker proposal should be viewed as external pressure to stimulate needful reforms that the university system would never undertake on its own.