Poll Shows Student Debt Policy May Be Killing Biden

Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign comes at a unique moment for the economy and how the electorate perceives it. 

Looking at the economy through the standard macroeconomic lens everything points in a positive direction. Unemployment remains below 4 percent for the longest stretch of time in 50 years, and inflation has retreated without the pain of a recession many predicted. Yet many voters, including those in key demographics Biden needs to win, are not experiencing the economy in the same way.

At the beginning of the Biden administration, the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a massive increase in America’s social safety net culminating in the passage of the American Rescue Plan at the start of Biden’s term. Americans received direct cash benefits from the government, health insurance was heavily subsidized, unemployment benefits were expanded, student loan payments paused, and the child tax credit sent cash to nearly every American family, lifting millions from poverty. That’s aside from the direct checks periodically ballooning people’s checking accounts, leading to the largest reserve of savings among consumers in American history. 

All of these programs, however, have since disappeared. The spending from programs subsequently passed by Congress is far more abstract to the general public, making it more difficult for voters to explicitly credit Biden. Infrastructure spending is critical, but the waters get muddied as Republicans who voted against the bill often show up at ribbon cuttings and issue press releases when projects break ground in their districts. Funding provided by the CHIPS Act is even more opaque to most Americans. The last two years have seen a transition from direct to indirect benefits.

Could the ending of these benefits, granted during the pandemic as part of the American Rescue Plan and other legislation that have since sunsetted, been overturned by the Supreme Court, rolled back, or ended by Congress be causing Biden’s weakness among certain key demographic groups — young voters in particular?

In other words: Have voters experienced a political rug pull, causing them to move away from Biden? During a crypto “rug pull,” the scammer abandons a project and runs off with their investor’s money. During a political “rug pull,” a benefit that a voter had is taken away. The taxpayers who were benefiting now feel poorer than when they started because they are forced to cover a shortfall once covered by the government.

To test this premise of whether “rug pull” voters exist, it made the most sense to look at student loan recipients. More than 43 million people hold student debt. Student loan repayments were first paused during the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden famously issued an executive order to cancel $10,000 of each borrowers’ debt. Republicans sued to block it, and the Supreme Court struck down his plan. A Republican-led Congress, as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling, forced the administration to restart loan payments this fall.

And by looking at student debt, while taking the survey, respondents would not be required to recall whether or not they received a benefit. Instead, they simply were being asked to disclose a fact about their current financial situation: whether or not they have student debt.

As part of an omnibus poll conducted by Positive Sum Strategies, a Democratic-leaning firm, I asked whether respondents currently had student loan debt, who they voted for in 2020, and who they planned to vote for in 2024. These questions were separated in the survey from political questions about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or the 2024 presidential election to avoid questionnaire bias. 

The results give an initial indication about the impact of student loans on voters under 45: As of November 30, voters burdened with student debt under the age of 45 prefer Trump over Biden by 3 percentage points. Voters who do not have student debt choose Biden by 9 points.

Graphic: The Intercept/Data: Positive Sum Strategies

(Biden canceled $132 billion in student loan debt debts for 3.6 million people in the past three years; many in this group would be included in the group with no student debt, which marginally favored Biden.) 

The first objection to drawing any conclusion from this data might be around the characteristics of the different cohorts. Maybe there’s something about holding student debt — related to wealth or education status, perhaps — that makes a person more likely to vote for Trump, meaning the fact of the debt itself is just a coincidence. Correlation but not causation, as they say. 

Perhaps. But that didn’t hold true in 2020, when the two groups voted in nearly identical ways. Voters with no student debt in 2020 favored Biden 47-27 percent, while voters with the debt preferred him by 45-29 percent. While Biden won 45 percent of voters with student debt in 2020, he’s winning just 31 percent of them now. Most have not gravitated to Trump: The former president carried 29 percent of young people with student debt in 2020 but only wins 34 percent now.

Graphic: The Intercept/Data: Positive Sum Strategies

Among all voters, the pattern suggests that age plays a key role in voting as opposed to currently owing student debt (e.g. young people are more likely to have student debt). The fact that the effect is strongest when controlling for age (examining only those under the age of 45) strengthens the thesis.

Graphic: The Intercept/Data: Positive Sum Strategies

The simplest explanation for this decline among young voters is, from 2020 to 2023, voters did not have to make their student loan payments. With an average student loan payment of hundreds of dollars per month, this amounted to a substantial deduction in borrowers’ monthly income and a worsening of their personal economic condition.

It should also be noted that both young voters with debt and without debt increased their support of Trump by 5 points, suggesting this issue has not yet driven a shift from Biden to Trump, but rather from Biden to undecided. 

Of course, this analysis does not mean the student debt payment restart alone drove the shift in general attitude attitudes. Those who would be swayed by a similar phenomenon, however, are also those who would feel the sting of the other rug pulls acutely, as well, from the child tax credit and beyond. Further research should be conducted into those who received other benefits that have disappeared in the last two years. 

With 11 months until the 2024 election, Biden could win back “rug pull” voters over the course of the campaign. However, while the Biden White House and Democrats place the blame for the student loan restart squarely at the feet of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and congressional Republicans, most Americans are simply not in the weeds enough to understand these explanations. (Data suggests the adage holds true: If you are explaining, you are losing.)

While this data is not conclusive, it does suggest that the Biden campaign needs to do substantive work to bring these voters back into the fold. 

Positive Sum Strategies conducted an omnibus poll on November 29-30, 2023. The online sample consisted of 1,238 respondents weighted to education, gender, race, respondent quality, and 2020 election results. The margin of error is +/- 3.9.

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