Wisconsin is one of those states that President Joe Biden will probably need to win if he’s to win the 2024 election. Unfortunately for him, it seems to be leaning more toward Trump than it has in the past, with the two being more or less neck in neck and some polls even showing Trump with a multi-point advantage in the state.
If Biden is to win, his best path to doing so is likely to try to mobilize as much support at the polls as possible in Dane County, which is the deeply progressive and quickly growing part of the state in which the city of Madison, Wisconsin site. Inside Madison is the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the behemoth university that pushes the town even more to the left by being a beacon for generally progressive students and professors.
Such is likely why President Biden visited Madison on Monday, May 8, and, while speaking to the technical college in the town, announced his new plan to pay off student loans across the country. Both the visit and announcement seemed intended as a campaign trip meant to stir up his flagging support in the state and with younger voters.
Yet, when President Joe Biden visited Madison, the response he received was somewhat lukewarm, as even the New York Times admitted. According to that paper, Biden received a muted response from the college town, which is less than enthusiastic about the aging president because younger voters on the left generally disagree with his administration’s support of Israel during its war in Gaza. Reporting on the situation in Wisconsin after claiming that student response was muted, the NYT reported:
Last week, when Wisconsin voters went to the polls in snow and rain for the now-very-much-effectively-over presidential primaries, nearly 50,000 people cast “uninstructed” votes on the Democratic side — meaning 8.3 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters seemingly decided to use their ballots to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
That wasn’t enough to net the “uninstructed” voters any delegates to this summer’s Democratic National Convention, as “uncommitted” voters did in Michigan, where the protest movement was born.
But it was enough to send a signal about voters’ discontent with Biden — particularly in a state that he won by just 20,682 votes in 2020.
Continuing, the NYT went on to note that younger voters, when polled on the issue, are generally less likely to vote in 2024 than they were in the 2020 election, one of the actors that helped tilt the election toward Biden then. That poll might have been the reason, or at least one of the contributing factors, behind his decision to again attempt to cancel student debt loans, something characterized by many commenters as an attempt to stir up enthusiasm and support among young voters.
Watch Biden announce his plan to cancel student loans here:
In a press release, the Biden Administration said, “The plans, if implemented, would provide debt relief to over 30 million Americans when combined with actions the Biden-Harris Administration has already taken to cancel student debt over the past three years. While Republican elected officials try every which way to block millions of their own constituents from receiving student debt cancellation, President Biden has vowed to use every tool available to cancel student debt for as many borrowers as possible, as quickly as possible.”
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