To Win In 2024, Biden Should Run On Mass Debt Relief

Millions of Americans are drowning in debt. Ahead of the upcoming election, Democrats can do what’s both right and popular by promising to cancel it.

Hard as it may be to believe, the 2024 presidential election is now little more than a year away. Despite four criminal indictments, Donald Trump’s defiance of political gravity shows no signs of abating, even as he has defended the January 6 insurrection and vowed to lock up his political opponents. Given Trump’s penchant for authoritarianism and the threat his followers pose to our political system — especially in light of Democrats’ failure to pass desperately needed democratic reforms—President Biden’s temptation in the next year will likely be to deploy the same emotive, content-light “battle for the soul of the nation” argument that he used in 2022, ahead of the midterms. After all, there’s precedent for Democrats: Party strategists employed a similar framing tactic in 2016, when Hillary Clinton turned the election into a referendum on whether America is “better than Donald Trump” and claimed punningly that “love trumps hate.”

A demonstrator protests near Grand Army Plaza during a rally to cancel student loan debts.

It is worth reminding voters of all the ways that Trumpism imperils our freedoms. If he becomes the Republican presidential nominee, Trump threatens to impose frightening changes like the revocation of birthright citizenship and instituting Schedule F, which would purge the federal bureaucracy of 50,000 career civil servants and replace them with far-right extremists and allies. He also promises to reverse progress on mitigating climate change while centralizing power and punishing his political enemies.

But if President Biden and the Democrats want to defeat Trump and his MAGA movement, along with highlighting the dangers of a vindictive demagogue winning in 2024, they will need to run on a positive platform which would improve the material lives of working people. Central to that program should be taking on the fight to eliminate student and medical debt.