"Educated" to Nixon being the Yale/Harvard types, who he had cartoonish-level resentment for his entire life.
This.
He received a scholarship to Harvard but didn't go and attended Whittier College (the community college) instead so he could continue supporting his family. He resented elitist types like Kennedy who got everything on a silver platter, and he used the fact that he never went to an Ivy League college as a point of pride. This is not to say he wasn't intelligent - he skipped grades and, as I said, he received a scholarship to Harvard.
Nixon probably in many ways was the least Elitist Republican President in the modern era and while Reagan and HW are my favorite presidents in that period, they were definitely were more elitist than Nixon
H.W. for sure (his family were literally coastal elitists), but Reagan didn't seem particularly elitist, either (though I guess he had the 'Hollywood liberal' stereotype applied to him since he was in Hollywood and was affiliated with the Democrats for a while).
I wouldn't say Reagan was really elite but he definitely was more friendly with the media and many cultural institutions than Nixon was. Of course the Media covered Nixon very negatively and Reagan pretty positively so that probably had much to do with it, and Reagan's Hollywood background probably made cultural institutions like Reagan more too.
Reagan's base was also probably more UMC as well though thats a different story
