Young Voters Are Pretty Meh About Biden’s Student Debt Relief and Weed Pardons

President Joe Biden’s long-hyped moves this fall to cancel some student debt and change federal cannabis policy didn’t change the minds of young voters much—a demographic crucial for turnout as Democrats seek to keep control of Congress in November, according to a VICE News/YouGov poll conducted in mid-October.

The poll found that a plurality of voters under age 45 said Biden’s cannabis pardons and his order to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans for people making less than $125,000 a year had “no effect” on their voting intentions this year, and overall, issues such as inflation, jobs, and abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade are weighing much more heavily on voters’ minds as the election draws near. 

The online survey of 3,000 U.S. adults was conducted during the week of October 17.

This year, 46 percent of those 18 to 29 say they’re “definitely” or “probably” going to vote on November 8, according to survey findings. That’s compared to 36 percent voter turnout in that age group in 2018, Census numbers show, and that was considered an extremely high-turnout year for a midterm election.

On the question of whether student loan forgiveness would affect how they vote, 38 percent of young adults under 29 said it would make them more likely to vote for Democrats—but 42 percent said it had no effect, as well as 20 percent who said it made them less likely to vote for Democrats. By contrast, 41 percent of voters over 65 said forgiveness made it less likely they’d vote for Democrats, as opposed to 25 percent who said they’d be more likely.

Overall, 29 percent of respondents said they were more likely to vote for Democrats due to the plan and 30 percent said they were less likely to, while 40 percent said it had no effect. 

Part of the reason for this could be that no one has actually seen the benefit of forgiveness yet. The Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness application portal only opened during the weekend of October 14; on Monday, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked the plan following a challenge from Republican states. 

Biden’s moves on cannabis made more of a split between helping Democrats and having no impact. Forty percent of voters under 29 said Biden’s announcement made them more likely to vote for Democrats, while 39 percent between the age of 30 and 44 said the same, and more than 40 percent of those in both age cohorts said it had no impact on them. 

While older white voters were less likely to be moved to vote for Democrats by the cannabis pardons than younger white voters, the opposite was true for Black voters. Nearly 60 percent of Black voters aged 18-29 said the announcement had no impact on their vote, while more than half of Black voters aged 45-64 said they were more likely to vote for Democrats.

Fewer than one-fifth of voters under 45 said they were less likely to vote for Democrats because of the cannabis pardons. 

Though Biden’s moves on weed represented the federal government’s biggest shift on cannabis policy in decades, the pardons specifically were largely symbolic. No one currently sits in federal prison solely due to a simple cannabis possession charge, and Biden could only encourage governors to follow suit in pardoning people convicted and sentenced at the state level.

While Biden’s moves to address demands from his base on weed and student loans have met with lukewarm response, early voting suggests that turnout could rival the 2018 midterms elections, which saw the largest midterm turnout in decades. More than two-thirds of respondents to the VICE News poll said they’d already voted or were likely to vote in the midterms this year. 

Early voting has exploded, for example, in the crucial swing state of Georgia, with more than 1 million people casting ballots early since voting began last week. Virginia has also seen an uptick in early voting, while early voting in Texas and North Carolina is down slightly relative to 2018. Texas and Georgia, both states where Republicans control every level of state government, passed new restrictions on voting after the 2020 election. 

Democrats currently hold both chambers of Congress, but they appear likely to lose the House of Representatives and are struggling to keep the Senate. Despite weak economic conditions and Biden’s low approval rating, a separate YouGov/Economist poll conducted from Oct. 22-25 found Democrats with a narrow advantage in the generic ballot—indicating that, at this point, the election is effectively a toss-up. 

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