Canceling student debt wasn’t a major part of Joe Biden’s campaign pitch when he ran for president in 2020. Once in office, however, he cozied up to these proposals, a strategy that ultimately backfired.
During that campaign, Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wanted to cancel $50,000 in student debt per borrower or more, while Biden, portraying himself as a moderate, backed a far lower threshold based on income. Biden won the Democratic nomination, of course, and then the White House.
As president, Biden leaned harder toward the Sanders-Warren position.
His first plan canceled up to $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 rolled around, Biden’s cancellation plans covered about $175 billion worth of loans held by about 5 million borrowers.
Biden clearly tried to appease the Democratic Party’s left wing 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 atop the Democratic ticket in August and basically ran on his record. Yet Harris ended up doing worse with the groups targeted by student debt cancellation than Biden did in 2020.
Biden won 61% of the vote among 18-to-29-year-olds in 2020, for instance, while Harris won just 51% of them in 2024, according to AP VoteCast. Biden won 57% of college grads in 2020, while Harris performed one percentage point worse with this group in 2024.
The flip side is also true. Donald Trump won 51% of non-college grads in 2020 and 55% of them in 2024.
A persistent problem with the Democratic Party is a focus on feel-good programs for groups of voters the Democrats consider their base, with precious little for those outside the base.
Many of those programs are meant to target progressives who got fired up for Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. But the enthusiasm for redistributionist policies simply fails to ignite mainstream voters in national elections.
In the 2024 election, for instance, 57% of voters were non-college grads and just 43% were college grads, according to AP VoteCast. So Biden’s high-profile effort to cancel student debt did precisely nothing for at least 57% of voters.
About 100 million Americans have a college degree, and about 57% of them have paid off their student debt or otherwise covered the cost of their education. Meaning they, too, got nothing from Biden’s debt relief, leaving these policies targeted at roughly 40 million student borrowers. Data through Monday showed there were just over 145 million votes cast in the presidential election.