Joe Biden has spent his entire presidency pandering to various groups. As an old white guy from a party that hates old white guys, he's done everything possible to compensate for his race and gender. He promised to pick a woman as his running mate and did. He promised to nominate a black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. If he can nominate the first fill-in-the-blank for some position, he will, and he has. His judicial nominations have been the epitome of affirmative action picks, and some have been embarrassingly awful.
Another group he's shamelessly pandered to is young people. Biden promised student loan forgiveness on the campaign trail, and came through on that promise just before the 2022 midterm elections. Though the Supreme Court eventually overturned it, Biden has sought alternative ways to cancel student debt. By the end of 2023, Biden had canceled $132 billion in student debt for over 3.6 million Americans, according to the White House, and he's continued to cancel more.
So far, though, this blatant attempt to bribe young voters hasn't worked. Polls have shown that Biden is losing support from this important demographic compared to 2020.
“He’s doing all the right things that you would think that young voters would flock to, but unfortunately, they haven’t been able to put that message out there in the community,” Adolph Mongo, a Democratic strategist based in Michigan, told the Daily Caller. “Well, you’ve done eight things, but this ninth thing is unforgiven. And you put your arm around this war monger in Israel, and then, you know, you can’t unwrap yourself from him.”
Related: Is the Democrats' Demographic Coalition Teetering on the Brink of Collapse?
This week, it was reported that Democrats are being advised not to target young voters in registration drives because they're likely going to vote for Trump. However, the Biden campaign "has largely operated on the assumption that current public polls which show alarming drops in support among base voters will shift over the coming months, a fact that could change the calculations for bulk voter registration."
You think maybe they knew something? Well, it should come as no surprise that it was reported that Biden is pushing for a new plan to cancel student loan debt for millions more borrowers. Biden will be traveling to the battleground state of Wisconsin to discuss the new plan on Monday. Donald Trump has a razor-thin lead in Wisconsin in the RealClearPolitics average.
While Biden's efforts to cancel student loan debt have been ongoing, they clearly haven't moved the needle in his favor. Earlier this year, a USA Today/Suffolk poll showed that Trump currently leads among voters under 35, with 37% support compared to Biden's 33%. To put things in perspective, Biden had a 24-point lead from this group during the 2020 election. A more recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll from last week showed Trump up a point over Biden among registered voters under 45 years old. An Emerson poll released Thursday showed Biden only up 10 points among voters 18 to 29 years old—a substantial decrease from the 24-point advantage he had in 2020.
In other words, so far, Biden's bribes haven't worked. At this point, it's hard to see what he could do to change that.
