Biden, Student Loans, & the 2022 Elections

President Joe Biden (D-DE)

Heading into the 2020 presidential primaries, Joe Biden was a logical choice for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.  Donald Trump clearly had resonated with a certain sector of the American electorate who had been at the very least dormant during the 2008 & 2012 elections, and so picking a candidate with broad general election appeal made sense.  Biden didn't have the liberal bonafides of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, he didn't have the new generation leader cache of Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris, and he didn't have billions of dollars at his disposal like Mike Bloomberg.  What he did have, though, was the broadest possible appeal-he was palatable to "No Trump" Republicans who might've just skipped the election against someone like Warren or Sanders (and voted third party instead of for Hillary Clinton), and he wasn't as conservative as Bloomberg, so liberals could hold their nose and vote for him, in hopes of getting Trump out of office.  As was evidenced by how close the 2020 election was in the electoral college (the popular vote was not close at all as Americans overwhelmingly rejected President Trump), this broad appeal strategy worked.  Biden was able to win over the right groups of voters in important places like Wisconsin, Georgia, & Pennsylvania in a way that Sanders & Warren would've struggled.  Beating an incumbent president in the modern age is next-to-impossible, and Democrats were smart to go with their best option in that fight because I sincerely believe that (based on how 2020 ended up) Biden might've been the only person who could legitimately beat Trump in the electoral college.

But Biden not being the choice of progressives has put him in an awkward position, and this has become a point of consternation on Twitter, specifically when it comes to student loan debt.  The Biden administration is set to resume mandatory student loan payments on January 31st, and on the surface this makes sense.  While inflation continues to be a problem, unemployment in the country is at historic lows.  Most people have jobs right now, certainly most people who are actively seeking them out.  While there are arguments to be made (and I'll make them in a second) that Biden should extend this for other reasons, the economy is not what it was a year ago, and while Covid & the Omicron variant hang over our economic picture for the next year, the evidence is relatively clear that Americans aren't necessarily in a worse financial picture today than they were two years ago.

That "two years ago" needs to be brought up because the student loan extension at this point is not about Covid anymore, but instead about the concept of student loans to begin with.  There is a large swath of the Democratic Party, particularly younger progressives, who favor eliminating student loan debt all-together. This is the group of people who preferred Sens. Warren & Sanders in the primary, but voted for Biden in the general election.  These people would prefer Biden to take a sweeping & unprecedented move to eliminate all student loan debt in the country.

It's worth noting that these advocates are combining both wishful thinking with a legitimate campaign promise that Joe Biden made on the campaign trail.  Biden did not, like Warren, promise to eliminate student loan debt entirely, though he did promise to eliminate "at least $10,000" worth of student loan debt from anyone who had it (currently over 46 million Americans carry some form of student loan debt).  Democrats are right to hold him accountable to this campaign promise, but I think this is my first "reality check" I want to throw out right now on this-that Biden did not campaign on eliminating student loan debt, and I think it's unreasonable to assume that Biden would suddenly become more liberal on an issue that the "at least $10,000" was a stretch to get him to take (Joe Biden wouldn't have made that promise in 2016), given how sharply divided Congress is right now & the fact that he made that promise at the height of the Democratic primaries (i.e. when he was going to take the most liberal position he would consider crossing).

But the paths for that $10,000 are limited.  The easiest way would be to go through Congress, but that's a no-go, and not just because Joe Manchin won't eliminate the filibuster.  It's not entirely clear that student loan forgiveness is a popular issue that could even get fifty votes in the Senate, much less sixty.  The Build Back Better bill has already dropped Biden's less controversial free state college bill, which has broader support-I doubt Biden could get student loan forgiveness added into the bill, and if he did, I don't think it'd pass. Democrats have learned this lesson over-and-over again in the past year, but I don't entirely think it's sunk in considering how often the gut reaction on Twitter is "primary Sinema" and not "elect more progressives to the Senate in seats currently held by Republicans."  It'd be a lot different conversation right now if people like Russ Feingold, Katie McGinty, & Sara Gideon held seats in states Biden won in 2020-focusing just on Sinema is missing the forest for the trees.

The other path is an executive action, but Biden opens up a gigantic can-of-worms there that I don't know would hold up in court.  It's possible that Biden could wash away billions of dollars worth of student loan debt with the stroke of a pen, but that comes with two big problems, one legal & the other electoral.  It is not clear that the president believes he has the authority to pass student loan forgiveness, and this is a theory others share (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, arguably Biden's strongest ally on Capitol Hill, has said unequivocally that she thinks he cannot do it).  Biden doing this via executive action and then having the courts decide to overrule it might play well with his base ("at least he tried"), but part of me thinks he'd still struggle with Democrats who were angry he couldn't make loan forgiveness stick.

The other part, though, and this is where I think Democrats need to make sure they're looking beyond their own checkbook, is that it's not clear that this move would be popular. While 46 million Americans carry some form of student loan debt, that's only 22% of the American adult population.  If you look at the percentage of Americans over 25 with a bachelor's degree, that number is higher, but it's still just 36%.

Public polling on this issue is limited & has some variation, but it also backs up the idea that most Americans don't support an action like this.  A Grinnell College poll from earlier this year found that only 27% of respondents supported unilateral student loan forgiveness.  An additional 39% supported it for those in need, but the definition of what "in need" here is a struggle (and adding in income requirements to an executive action would make it far less likely to stand up in court).  Vox did polling that showed a bare majority of respondents supported student loan forgiveness of up to $50,000...but only for those who make less than $125,000 a year, which again would be a struggle to hold up in court unless this was enacted via congressional action.

As a result, this is not just a risky gambit judicially, but also electorally.  Democrats cannot win elections based solely on college-educated voters-there aren't enough of them.  Biden signing onto a bill unilaterally that would exclusively help college-educated voters, a move that would almost certainly be at risk in court, and is not supported by a Democratic Congress, feels like a nonstarter.  You could make a sincere argument that eliminating student loan debt would help the entire economy, not just those directly impacted, by letting Millennials & Gen Z move their current student loan payments into investments like housing, retirement, & retail purchases (this argument is valid, and why on principle I personally support some form of student loan relief), but it's hard to see the bulk of those not immediately impacted being nuanced enough to see this as a victory for their own financial situation.  There's nothing more American than "I want mine," and watching the most-educated (and therefore, on paper, the group most likely to have income advancement) voters get a huge part of their debt relieved while others are saddled with other kinds of debt feels like it would have reverberations at the ballot box in 2022 that Democrats are not considering.  Yes, college-educated voters might punish Biden & the Democrats for not forgiving student loan debt...but it seems near certain that there's more risk that those on the other side of this issue would punish Biden for taking this action, and right now, there are a lot more of them than there are people who support student loan forgiveness.