Joe Biden’s 2024 Election campaigns come at a unique time for the economy and voter perception.
If you look at the economy through a standard macroeconomic lens, everything is pointing in a positive direction. The unemployment rate has remained below 4% for the longest period in 50 years, and inflation has receded without the pain of recession that many had expected. But many voters, including the key demographic Biden needs to win, don’t experience the economy in the same way.
At the beginning of the Biden administration, America’s social safety net was significantly strengthened due to the coronavirus pandemic, culminating in the passage of the American Rescue Plan at the start of Biden’s term. Americans receive direct cash transfers from the government, health insurance is heavily subsidized, unemployment benefits are expanded, student loan payments are suspended, and the Child Tax Credit provides cash to nearly every American family. and millions of people were lifted out of poverty. That’s aside from the direct checks that regularly pad people’s checking accounts. Largest amount of savings among consumers in American history.
However, all of these programs have since disappeared. Spending from programs subsequently passed by Congress is far more abstract to the general public, making it more difficult for voters to articulate Biden’s accomplishments. Infrastructure spending is important, but the picture is clouded by the fact that Republican lawmakers who voted against the bill frequently appear at ribbon cuttings and issue press releases when projects break ground in their districts. The funding provided by the CHIPS Act is even more opaque to most Americans. The past two years have seen a shift from direct to indirect benefits.
The discontinuation of these benefits granted during the pandemic as part of the American Rescue Plan, and other legislation that has since expired, been overturned or repealed by the Supreme Court, or been struck down by Congress, will result in certain key Is it causing Mr. Biden to weaken among demographic groups — especially younger voters?
In other words, have voters experienced the political rug being pulled under them and moving away from Biden? cryptography Fraudsters who “pull the rug” abandon the project and run away with investors’ money. Political “rug pull” strips voters of their benefits. Taxpayers who benefited now feel poorer than they started because they have to make up the shortfall that the government covered.
To test this premise of whether there is a “rug-pull-the-rug” electorate, it makes the most sense to look at student loan recipients. More than 43 million people have student loans. Student loan repayments were suspended for the first time during the coronavirus pandemic. Biden famously issued an executive order canceling $10,000 in debt for each borrower. Republicans sued to block it, and the Supreme Court struck down his plan. The Republican-led Congress forced the administration to resume loan payments this fall as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
Examining student loans also eliminates the need for respondents to recall whether they received benefits when completing the survey. Instead, they were simply asked to disclose the facts about their current financial situation: whether they had student loans.
As part of an omnibus poll conducted by the Democratic-leaning firm Positive Sam Strategies, I asked respondents whether they currently have student loan debt, who they would vote for in 2020, and who they would vote for in 2024. I asked him if he was planning on doing so. These questions are divided into: To avoid survey bias, the survey consisted of political questions about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or the 2024 presidential election.
The results provide the first indication of the impact student loans have on voters under 45. As of Nov. 30, voters under 45 with student debt preferred Trump over Biden by 3 percentage points. Voters without student loans chose Biden by a 9-point margin.
(Biden cancel Over the past three years, 3.6 million people have accumulated $132 billion in student loan debt. Many in this group would be included in the group without student loans, which narrowly favored Biden).
The first objection to drawing any conclusions from this data may concern the characteristics of the different cohorts. Maybe there’s something about having student debt, perhaps related to wealth or education, that makes a person more likely to vote for Trump. This means that the fact of the debt itself is just a coincidence. As is often said, there is correlation, but not causation.
perhaps. But that wasn’t the case in 2020, with the two groups voting in roughly the same way. In 2020, voters without student loans supported Mr. Biden 47% to 27%, while voters with debt supported Mr. Biden 45% to 29%. Biden won 45% of voters with student loans in 2020, but now he only has 31%. Most people aren’t drawn to Trump. The former president had 29 percent of young people with student debt in 2020, but now only 34 percent.
This pattern suggests that among all voters, age plays a more important role in voting than current student loan debt (e.g., younger people are less likely to have student debt Probability is high). The fact that the effect is strongest when controlling for age (testing only those under 45) supports this hypothesis.
The simplest explanation for this decline among younger voters is that from 2020 to 2023, voters did not have to pay student loans.and Average student loan repayment amount This amounted to hundreds of dollars per month, significantly reducing the borrower’s monthly income and worsening his or her personal financial situation.
It’s also notable that both young voters with debt and young voters without debt increased their support for Trump by 5 points, rather than this issue still driving a transition from Biden to Trump. , rather suggesting a transition from Biden to undecided.
Of course, this analysis does not mean that restarting student loan payments alone caused a general change in attitude. But the same people who are affected by this phenomenon are also the ones who will also feel the greatest pain from the child tax credit and beyond. Further investigation will need to be carried out on those who received other benefits that have disappeared in the past two years.
There are 11 months left until the 2024 election, but Mr. Biden has the potential to win back “reclusive” voters through his campaign. But while President Biden and the Democratic Party are placing the blame for student loan resumption squarely at the feet of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republicans in Congress, most Americans are far enough out of the weeds to understand these explanations. It’s not even in there. (Data suggests this adage is true: “He who explains is losing.”)
The data is not conclusive, but it does suggest that the Biden campaign needs to make substantial efforts to bring these voters back into the fold.
Positive Sum Strategies conducted the omnibus poll on November 29 and 30, 2023. The online sample consisted of his 1,238 respondents, weighted by education, gender, race, respondent quality, and 2020 election results. The margin of error is +/- 3.9.
