Dem
51
GOP
49
Many young people had really hoped that Joe Biden would cancel their crushing student debt, as he promised to do. Now they have heard he is not going to do it so the blame game starts. Will they blame him and not vote next year? A new poll from Generation Lab may give him some hope. The pollster asked whose fault it was that student loans won't be forgiven as promised. Here are the results.
As you can see, more young voters blame the Supreme Court than anyone else and next comes the Republican Party. Together, 85% blame one or the other. To us, that doesn't sound like "I am furious with Biden for not doing what he promised so I am going to stay home and not vote." With such a large number blaming the Republicans, that might even motivate some of them to get out and vote a straight Democratic ticket.
Below is a graphic showing the number of borrowers of student loans by amount and age:
The largest single category, with 4.6 million borrowers, is people 25 to 34 with under $10,000 in debt. In total, 14.7 million borrowers have under $10,000 in debt. For most of them, Biden's plan would have wiped out all of their debt. There are another 9.5 million who would have seen a substantial fraction of their debt wiped out, depending on their income and whether they had a Pell Grant. All in all, about 33 million people under 34 might have gotten some relief from Biden's plan. If most of them vote based on this issue, it could help him substantially.
Biden is going to use a different law to cancel the student debt of former students who are up to date on payments for more than 20 years, but that will affect only 800,000 former students of the 45 million who have student loans. Still, if the other 44.2 million are annoyed enough, this might motivate them to vote even more than if Biden had succeeded in canceling some debt because being angry is often a better motivator than being happy. (V)