Student Debt Relief and Democratic Turnout

Millions signed up overnight on government's new student debt cancellation portal, but the connection between better policy and voting still has to be made.

Eleven days ago, on a Friday night, the Biden Administration quietly launched the beta version of its student debt cancellation application, making good on its promise to forgive up to $20,000 per borrower for people who make less than $125,000 per year. By Monday, more than eight million had submitted their applications, despite the relative lack of publicity. A total of twenty-two million had filed for relief by the end of the week, more than half of all expected to be eligible. The application form takes less than five minutes to fill out; you give your name, Social Security number, date of birth, contact information, and you affirm that you meet the program’s income thresholds to qualify. No password is required.

Don Moynihan has already written a great piece about what this means for government tech. After recalling the abject failure of Healthcare.gov, which literally crashed on its launch day, generating reams of negative news, he notes, “The streamlined application shows what is possible when government prioritizes the public in the delivery of public services.” Indeed, there’s a world of difference between how Healthcare.gov was built in 2013 and how StudentAid.gov/debt-relief got built, which is a tribute to the quiet work of a generation of civic techies, excuse me, public interest technologists, who went into government. Moynihan adds, “This simplicity is no accident. It represents a series of choices informed by design principles that focus on how applicants experience the process. It’s a sharp contrast from how we normally think about government: confusing forms, hours spent tracking down documents to provide information that the government often has already, all accompanied by the feeling that the people on the other side of the screen are making it hard on purpose.”

Of course, the process could be even simpler. The federal government already has the information needed to automatically forgive debts for everyone eligible, but since the IRS doesn’t share data with the Department of Education, this hurdle remains. Still, I think Moynihan is 100% right to argue that in its simplicity and ease of use, the new student loan relief program “offers a model for how government can serve us all.” (See also this interview with Marina Nitze on how, as Chief Technology Officer for the Veterans Administration, she and her team revamped its online enrollment system, enabling 1.5 million veterans to instantly enroll in healthcare.)

This simple success has me thinking about two related ideas. First, that it is no surprise that the Republican Attorneys General of Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina have sued to block the implementation of student debt relief, winning a temporary stay on actual financial payments. The vast majority of people who stand to benefit from this program are young and of color. Those are two key constituencies whose participation in mid-term elections typically plummets compared to presidential election years. According to a recent national survey of 18-29 year-olds conducted by Data for Progress, one-third say they have current student debt, with nearly another ten percent saying they expect to someday. Only 20% say they are confident they will be able to make their monthly payments once they resume in January. The Biden debt relief plan has widespread support, with 86% of Democrats, 58% of independents and 44% of Republicans approving of it.

Will the successful launch of StudentAid.gov/debt-relief remind these young people of the government’s effort to ease their college loan burden? Will the Republican effort to stymie it piss them off and make them more likely to vote Democratic, or will it reinforce a sense that nothing will ever change for the better? We don’t know, though the fact that eight million people jumped to apply as soon as the portal was open, with no obvious top-down promotion, gives me some hope that, uh, the kids are alright. But that gets to something I’ve noted here before, how proponents of government as well as government itself do such a poor job of highlighting the ways they often benefit from big government programs. As Suzanne Mettler, the author of The Submerged State, wrote a decade ago, “Americans often fail to recognize government’s role in society, even if they have experienced it in their own lives. That is because so much of what government does today is largely invisible.”

As the Biden Administration and Democrats around the country rush now to try to convince voters that they really, really have been delivering on their promises to improve people’s lives, it’s frustrating to remember their, nay our, failure to build a coherent narrative back in the spring of 2021, when “shots, checks and jobs” was the shorthand for Biden’s first 100 days in office, but where the administration failed to capitalize on the joy people were feeling as they got their first COVID vaccinations. Dan Pfeiffer, the former Obama White House speechwriter, warned back then that left to its own devices, the mainstream media wouldn’t tell that story. He wrote then, “I can promise you that if Biden were failing to meet (as opposed to exceeding) his vaccination goals, the topic would have dominated the [press conference]. This dynamic is not unique to the press conference. … With each day, the passage of the American Rescue Plan fades further into the past, and more of the media moves onto the next crisis du jour.” Pfeiffer added, with words that are as true now as a year ago, “Utilizing the media as the primary communication vehicle means the success or failure of our political strategy depends on the whims of news executives who do not share our interests. Think of it this way. Our message is the product, and the voters are the customers. A business would never entrust the distribution of its product to a competitor. Yet, that’s exactly what Democrats do when they rely on the New York Times and others to tell voters about our accomplishments and agenda.”

All that said, I’m staying hopeful about next month’s midterms because I suspect pollsters are under-estimating the relative weight of young people and women in the 2022 electorate. I was recently reminded of this piece by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn from September 2016. In tandem with a survey of 867 likely Florida voters about their presidential preferences, Cohn gave four other polling outfits the same raw data that the Times had collected. Using identical data, these five pollsters produced divergent results amount to a five-point spread between their top and bottom predictions. Why the variation? Because “the pollsters made different decisions in adjusting the sample and identifying likely voters.” Will whites be 65% of the actual electorate, or 70%? Will Blacks be just 10% or 14%? Who is really a likely voter? Even when you use past vote history to define likely voters, you’re still guessing about variations in intensity.

So, maybe more young people than in past midterms are going to turn out, in part because of tangible changes in their lives like student loan relief. And maybe more women will turn out because of the fear and uncertainty created by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. Certainly, whatever happens next month isn’t just within the margin of error. It’s within our margin of effort.

—Bonus link: Ronald Brownstein in the Atlantic on the role of Millennial and Gen Z voters and how their rising level of participation in recent cycles is going to be tested this year.

—Also don’t miss Nancy Scola’s in-depth profile in Wired of Tara McGowan’s Good Information network of progressive news sites in Wired. They’re trying to fill the information vacuum on the left, and running into headwinds from the likes of media traditionalist Steve Brill.

But Her Emails!

Odds and Ends

—There’s something very troubling about this quote from Norm Eisen, President Obama’s ethics czar and former Ambassador to the Czech Republic, coming to the defense of Stacey Abrams and Fair Fight Action for having paid at least $9.4 million in legal fees to a small law firm chaired by a close personal friend, Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, lead counsel in Fair Fight’s ultimately unsuccessful Georgia voting rights lawsuit. In the story by Brittany Gibson of Politico, Craig Holman, a longtime campaign finance and ethics expert at Public Citizen, calls the relationship “a very clear conflict of interest,” but Eisen—who was asked by Fair Fight Action to contact Gibson on its behalf, said he saw nothing problematic: “It happens all the time. It is the way our system is built, that the political leaders and the policy leaders are one in the same. So this is not unique to Allegra. You can say the same thing about Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or, or Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy,” Eisen said. “We not only countenance it, we embrace it; that is the American political, legal and ethical system.”

Eisen hasn’t offered any more clarification to that quote so it’s hard to tell if he is just circling the wagons to shore up an embattled ally or really thinks that there’s nothing problematic about raising huge sums for a good cause and then paying what sure seem like exorbitant fees to a crony in the process. Not only has Eisen been a central player in recent efforts to hold former president Trump accountable (serving as co-counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment trial), he’s also a leading voice on anti-corruption efforts from his current perch at the Brookings Institution. Situational ethics, anyone?

—What were the 30 progressive members of Congress who signed onto a joint letter calling for more diplomacy to end the Ukraine war thinking? We’re at a hinge moment in the global struggle for democracy, and Ukrainians are on the front line making headway in defending their homeland and defeating the world’s worst petro-oligarch, and you break ranks now?