The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be a smackdown between Ivy League insiders and outsiders, “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban said on Tuesday.
“This is the public school kids vs the Ivy League and it shows in how they all act,” Cuban wrote in an X post after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate on the same day.
Former President Donald Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1968. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, graduated from The Ohio State University in 2009 and Yale Law School in 2013.
Harris and Walz, on the other hand, didn’t go to Ivy League colleges.
Harris earned her bachelor’s degree at Howard University, a historically black college, in 1986. She went on to earn her law degree at UC Hastings, which has since been renamed to UC Law, in 1989.
Walz pursued his undergraduate education at Chadron State College, a small public college in Nebraska, and graduated in 1989. He later earned a master’s degree from Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 2001.
Cuban would later acknowledge that calling the matchup a fight between public schools and the Ivy League wasn’t wholly accurate, given that Howard University is a private college and Vance is an Ohio State alum.
But while most would assume that an Ivy League education would be a plus among voters, Cuban says that Harris’ and Walz’s relatability would serve them well.
“People are tired of the ideologues and hate from both parties. They want to vote for normal people they can relate to. Walz can sit at the kitchen table and make you feel like you have known him forever,” Cuban wrote in a separate X post.
Cuban declined to comment further on his posts when approached by Business Insider.
For what it’s worth, since entering politics, Vance has been trying to distance himself from his college years at an elite institution.
Vance, who wrote in his memoir that graduating from Yale is the “coolest thing” he has ever done, ripped the US higher education system during his keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021.
“How ridiculous is it that we tell our young people to go to college to get brainwashed?” Vance said then.
“We have got to get out of the mindset that the only way to live a good life in this country, the only way for our children to succeed, is to go to a four-year university where people will learn to hate their country and acquire a lot of debt in the process.”
On the other hand, Trump has been more than eager to flaunt his educational credentials and smarts.
The property mogul once touted his Wharton education as “super genius stuff” and often mentions his late uncle, John Trump, who was an MIT faculty member, during rallies.
“Same genes. We have genes. We’re smart people,” Trump told rally-goers in Las Vegas in January. “We’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones, well it doesn’t work out so well, right?”
Representatives for the Harris and Trump campaigns didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
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