Earlier this week it seemed that President Joe Biden had pivoted sharply on student loans, reportedly expressing in meetings that his administration is “looking at different options” for forgiving them entirely. (Though comments two days later seemed to walk back this position.) If he goes for it, it would be a wild leap beyond what he proposed in his campaign—a $10,000 cancellation event—and an even wilder leap from the position he took at a town hall event in early 2021 that seemed to imply it bothered him that widespread loan cancellation would benefit high earners, or as he put it, “people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn.”

I’ve written in the past that I didn’t think Biden really
wanted to do loan cancellation, despite pressure from the progressive wing of
his party. That’s why he came up with the smallest cancellation plan among
major democratic candidates in the 2020 presidential primary, and it’s why he
has largely punted the issue to Congress since taking office, claiming a lack
of legal authority to execute his campaign promise without legislation.

I don’t think any of that has changed. What has changed is
the political climate and prospects for Democrats leading into midterms and
beyond. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Democrats anticipated an uphill battle in the midterms. Historically, the party in the White House tends to lose seats. But they didn’t anticipate their other obstacles, which include failure to pass a social spending bill that would enact any of their 2020 promises and the angst of a populace enduring historic rates of inflation. It seems that some in the party might be hoping that student loan cancellation would be a ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak forecast.

If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you might think that student loan cancellation is wildly popular, but a recent poll suggests that just 38 percent of young Americans support canceling student loan debt in total. Biden may win favor with this very vocal minority if he moves forward with loan forgiveness through executive action, but he also risks alienating everyone else.

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