The Youth Vote and Student Loan Issue Is Key for Biden and Trump in 2024: The 2024 Presidential Election will be the most contentious in history. In fact, it will be the most important in our lifetimes. Now, I understand that each election year, every pundit from both parties makes that case.
Often, that is nothing more than a scare tactic designed to galvanize their respective voters into action to ensure that the pundits’ preferred politician is elected.
In the case of 2024, though, it’s really the most important election of our lifetime. It is, without a doubt, the last possible chance to return America to the normalcy we all took for granted until the novel coronavirus erupted from Wuhan, China.
This election is a fulcrum point in our nation’s history. It is truly a point of no return. And, if the election is fought between the two most deeply unpopular candidates in recent history—Joe Biden and former President Donald J. Trump—then one can anticipate the election being a real squeaker.
The Youth Vote is Key to 2024
Both Biden and Trump will need every vote they can get.
What’s more, they cannot take for granted the votes their respective parties usually depend on. That’s why Biden has been playing hard for the youth vote.
Already a dependable Democratic Party constituency, the youth vote has proven decisive at key moments for Democrats.
It was first-time voting Millennials who pushed Barack Obama over the edge in his presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, for example. The youth vote helped to propel the unlikely, sclerotic, basement-dwelling Joe Biden to victory over Donald Trump in 2020.
Again in 2024, Biden is looking to the youth vote to give him the edge he needs to overcome the Republicans.
That is why the conservative-led Supreme Court of the United States’ (SCOTUS) decision to prevent the Biden Administration’s plan for forgiving student loan debt is just what the Biden Campaign needed to galvanize the young people of America.
Between that and Biden’s favorability (however slight) over Trump with independent voters as well as minority voters—notably females—adding the youth vote will prove key to the Biden reelection push.
The Republicans are completely out-of-touch both with reality and with young voters when it comes to the student loan issue. For many older Americans, notably those who went to college between the 1950s and 1980s, the idea that the US government should bail students who took out college loans is obscene.
If the level of student debt today—and the costs of college—were the same as they were 30-70 years ago, I would agree with the older voters who are irate over possibly being on the hook for other, younger peoples’ student debt load.
But the level of student and cost of college has exponentially increased over the last 30 years. That, combined with the fact that way too many people are going to colleges and leaving with degrees of decreasing value (if everyone has a degree then what does it really matter?).
Or that the average American worker—regardless of education—is not paid well enough to keep up with the costs of inflation, should lend itself to the idea that maintaining, even increasing, the costs of college on students seeking to take out loans is not just impractical. It is morally reprehensible—especially when our society encourages and indoctrinates its youth into believing in the cult of college.
Frankly, it really doesn’t matter what other voters think about the idea of forgiving student loans. What matters is how the dispossessed youth feel about the subject. The average student leaving college today is $32,731.
But so many young people have much more than that. And not all of them are entering fields or jobs that will allow for them to pay that back. The student loan industry is worth around $1.75 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.
More gallingly, the student loan industry has bought-and-paid-for so many politicians that laws have been enacted preventing students from being able to discharge the onerous debt load in bankruptcy.
Student Debt System is Unsustainable Today
Most Americans agree that the student debt system is both unsustainable and unfair to recent graduates, who effectively enter a workforce where they will likely be unable to pay back the debt anytime soon, meaning that family formation and other healthy behaviors society should seek to cultivate in their young people are delayed.
In some cases, they never happen.
A negative cycle is perpetuated among most of America’s young people so that their lives are harder and less hopeful than those of even their grandparents and great-grandparents, who were made to contend with world wars, economic crashes, and social unrest in their lifetimes.
These young people may never form families—the backbone of any economy—and communities will fail to thrive. Lack of children will create an imbalance in the long-run between the elderly, who are taking out government benefits.
If, in the long-term, there are fewer young people than there are old people, the entire system collapses like a house of cards.
All this because student debt is exploding and most jobs are not paying enough to just keep up with the increased cost of living, let alone managing onerous student debt. The Republicans had a real shot at addressing these problems in a realistic and fair way. But the Trump Administration eschewed dealing with this crisis. So, by definition, the Republicans left the field wide open to Democratic Party manipulation.
Democrats Press Their Advantage with the Young People
Now, the Democrats under Biden are taking advantage of the situation.
The student debt crisis is the animating issue for most young voters today. With the conservative-led SCOTUS having struck down Biden’s plan to “save” young people by forgiving their debt—Biden gets the best of both worlds. Think about it: the president doesn’t have to actually address the problem (thereby upsetting his megadonors). Biden does, however, get to present himself as a political martyr for the youth voters out there.
And a martyr and answer to their economic woes is precisely what the young people of America are looking for.
So, the SCOTUS likely made a decent ruling, in that the constitutionality of Biden’s proposal to use federal power to forgive student debt en masse. What’s more, the team around Biden likely knew that it was constitutionally dubious.
But why would they care?
After all, they will still get to reap the benefits politically. Republicans should have been much more forward-thinking on this issue.
Because of their failure to address this problem in any meaningful way, they may have ceded a considerable amount of the youth vote that, when combined with a large number of independent and minority voters, just might put Biden over-the-edge—especially if he faces off against the unpopular Donald Trump in 2024.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
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