Student debt: Democrats seek to galvanize young voters over Supreme Court ruling

Democrats are hoping to harness anger over the Supreme Court’s student loan debt ruling to galvanize younger voters in 2024, a demographic that helped the party earn critical victories in the midterms.

The court’s decision last week blocked President Biden’s debt forgiveness program and left many dispirited and without options or optimism for paying back their mounting school debt.

For now, Biden isn’t bearing the brunt of the blame. But Democrats also acknowledge the challenges they face with the voting group that has already soured on the president and who may feel even less motivation to support him after he failed to deliver on a key campaign promise.

“Young voters had seen that President Biden had their back with this initial student debt relief plan. It’s such a concrete, visceral issue that it’s absolutely a motivator for young people to get out and vote,” said Aaron Regunberg, a former Rhode Island representative who is running for a seat in Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District.

“I think if Biden continues to show that he’s got our backs, young people are going to continue to have his,” he said.

Many Democrats had coalesced around the sweeping education relief plan from the beginning. Biden announced an executive action that would eliminate between $10,000 and $20,000 for borrowers with outstanding federal loans, and candidates campaigned heavily on that pledge down the ballot. When November’s results offered more wins than expected, many credited the strong youth turnout as part of that success.

Younger voters who turned out in droves to elect Biden to the White House and protect seats in Congress two years later were particularly excited about the administration’s decision to nix large sums of debt they saw accumulating each month. They have been squeezed with rising tuition costs and inflation as part of their everyday realities and were pleased to see the historically moderate Biden take a progressive turn.

Liberals in particular celebrated the effort as one of their biggest achievements, showing what could be possible through executive action when the divided Congress otherwise got in the way.

Those plans, however, were deflated after the conservative 6-3 court deemed the measure unconstitutional. The decision came right after the majority of justices also ruled against affirmative action, delivering another strike against Democrats’ vision for progress and challenging the limitations of the Oval Office.

“With the student debt relief being off the table and also the acknowledgment that come October, repayment will restart, I think there’s a lot of frustration around it,” said Ameshia Cross, a political commentator and Democratic strategist. “This was a campaign promise. This was something that really helped to align a lot of voters.”

Within minutes, Democrats expressed outrage over both rulings from the conservative-leaning court and Biden moved to find a workaround. Conscious of the very measure that earned him important constituencies’ votes, Biden announced that he would use the Higher Education Act as a way to theoretically still provide relief.

Many credited Biden’s determination as a positive and decisive step. Further enraged by the court’s apparent politicization, activists said that they hope to see the president continue to find new ways to get around their late June decision. His pivot to invoke the 1960s-era act was seen as a welcomed move by many Democratic members of Congress and advocates who lobbied for the plan over the past several years.

“One of the smart things that President Biden did upon student debt relief basically being shut down by the Supreme Court is to announce that he’s still fighting,” said Cross. “This administration as well as their surrogates are going to go on the campaign trail and point to exactly who has shut this down from day one. It has been conservatives.”

Still, while many have said they are hopeful that Biden’s determination will eventually pay off, there’s an acceptance that the process is likely to be lengthy. Some predict that it could drag on without a conclusion before the election, creating more uncertainty about the electoral ramifications. The Department of Education is expected to hold a hearing July 18, but the unknown nature of how the rulemaking process will play out has so far left the door open to questions about when, if at all, a determination could be made on how much debt would be able to be forgiven.

“There are some people who are going to say this is a promise that was not kept,” said Cross. “I do think the argument of saying these were the individuals who stomped it out is an important one, but that doesn’t change the reality for people who really were counting on and needed this.”

While Biden, who has been critical against progressives’ and even some moderates’ pushes to expand the Supreme Court, sees the body in non-political terms, other Democrats have a more pessimistic view of the current makeup on the bench. Some argue that the latest round of rulings — including overturning Roe v. Wade last summer and delivering a major blow to affirmative action a year later — came down along ideological lines, recently favoring the Republican position and making the challenge greater for Democrats heading into upcoming cycles.

“I’m not surprised that a collection of justices who skirt ethics laws and take luxury vacations paid by billionaires and have shown a disdain for middle- and working-class folks would side with Wall Street predatory lenders over the law and over young people,” said Regunberg. “We should be clear about what is threatened and at risk by this decision.”

For young voters, those differences in worldview from those of prior generations are especially stark. They see priorities like equal rights for marginalized communities and women being bucked by GOP-appointed judges in courts across the country, with the decisions last month as signs that Democrats have to work even harder to give younger people a reason to turn out.

A coalition of progressive organizations mobilizing around recent Supreme Court decisions said there’s a lot at risk for young voters next year, but they put the onus on Biden to persuade them to his side.

“Democrats desperately need young people to turnout in 2024 and future elections. Young people believed President Biden would deliver student debt abolition — not a costly return to repayment without a penny of the promised relief,” the joint statement read from groups like Debt Collective, March for Our Lives, and the Sunrise Movement. “President Biden cannot afford another disappointment with young people — a vital voting bloc for Democrats.”

But others see the sheer anger over a handful of conservative justices’ power to control identity and quality of life issues as deeply motivating forces. Advocates say that’s absolutely the case for the more than 40 million Americans who would have been positively impacted by having many of their student loans waived, and Biden is still ultimately in the driving seat as long as he continues to garner voters’ support.

“How this plays out politically for this important voting bloc is kind of entirely in President Biden and the administration’s hands,” Regunberg said. “If he continues to come out aggressively and say this fight is not over, a message to everyone who’s impacted by this, you deserve better than this court and better than this broken student loan system, and we are going to continue fighting and using every authority we have. … I think voters are going to be galvanized.”

“They’re going to say we need to make sure that the folks who are fighting for us remain in office over the folks who are not,” he said.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.