Biden’s worst gamble? Supporting Student Debt Forgiveness (Video)

Student debt cancellation was not a major part of Joe Biden’s campaign pitch when he ran for president in 2020. Once in power, however, he pursued these proposals, a strategy that ultimately backfired.

During that campaign, Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wanted that Cancel $50,000 in student debt per borrower or more, while Biden, who portrayed himself as a moderate, favored a much lower threshold based on income. Biden, of course, won the Democratic nomination, and then the White House.

As president, Biden leaned more heavily toward the Sanders-Warren position.

His first plan was canceled until $20,000 in debt for most of the 43 million Americans with student loans. The Supreme Court blocked that, so Biden tried a number of different approaches.

By the time the 2024 election happened, Biden’s cancellation plans affected about $175 billion in loans from about 5 million borrowers.

Biden was clearly trying to appease the left wing of the Democratic Party and the young, college-educated voters it supposedly appeals to. Did it work? Not even close.

Biden’s student debt debacle is a microcosm of what went wrong for Democrats in 2024.

Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket in August and essentially ran on his record. Still, Harris ultimately did worse with the groups targeted for student debt cancellation than Biden did in 2020.

For example, Biden won 61% of the vote among 18- to 29-year-olds in 2020, while Harris won just 51% of them in 2024, according to AP VoteCast. Biden earned 57% of college degrees in 2020, while Harris performed one percentage point worse among this group in 2024.

The downside is also true. Donald Trump obtained 51% of non-college graduates in 2020 and 55% of them in 2024.

A persistent problem with the Democratic Party is its focus on feel-good programs for groups of voters who consider Democrats their base, with very little for those outside the base.

Many of those programs are intended to target progressives who supported Sanders during the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. But enthusiasm for redistributive policies simply fails to galvanize mainstream voters in national elections.

For example, in the 2024 election, 57% of voters were non-college graduates and only 43% were college graduates, according to AP VoteCast. So Biden’s high-profile attempt to cancel student debt has achieved exactly nothing for at least 57% of voters.

About 100 million Americans have a college degreeand about 57% of them have paid off their student loans or otherwise covered the costs of their education. This means that they too received nothing from Biden’s debt relief, leaving this policy targeted at about 40 million student borrowers. Data through Monday shows just over 145 million votes were cast in the presidential election.

Read more: Tips and tricks for paying off student loans quickly

Some borrowers who have paid off their loans or worked their way through college may also feel resentful about government subsidies intended to provide relief to other borrowers.

All things considered, it’s easy to argue that Biden has spent far too many resources appeasing student loan borrowers at the expense of others who could use more help.

Debt relief for students is expensive.

Biden’s entire relief plan would have done that will cost at least $870 billionwhich is approximately equivalent to one year’s national security expenditure. And Biden would have done so solely by executive order, which would have been an extraordinary evasion of Congress, which should direct all federal spending through legislation.

Non-university graduates may rightly ask: what about me? Where is my relief plan?

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Biden would respond, with some justification, that he has done a lot to help the American working class.

Are Infrastructure Act 2021 will create thousands of jobs in the coming years. Same with his 2022 green energy And semiconductor lawswhich have already achieved enormous growth factory construction.

Biden is the only US president to ever walk a picket line, and he has pushed for union protections in many of the bills he has signed and regulations he has imposed.

Yet there is a vast difference between Biden’s hard-fought and highly visible efforts to cancel student debt now and policy provisions deep in the subtext of the legislation intended to help workers, such as the CHIPS Act’s slow-moving prescription for extended release.

At the very least, student borrowers can see Biden fighting for them. In the meantime, many working families listen to the promises and wait.

Democrats are embarking on a lengthy autopsy of the 2024 election, aimed at determining how they lost touch with a majority of voters.

They could start by reexamining policies that exclude the majority in the first place. If you want to please a certain group of voters, make sure there are enough of them to help in the next election.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.

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