Democrats this election cycle are working hard to paint their Republican opponents as wild extremists who would slash all funding for student loans.
Inside Higher Ed took a look at a number of competitive races where Democrats have staked out education issues—particularly student loan funding—to attack the other side, despite education rarely being a top tier issue in such races.
Several of the ads seem to follow a similar pattern: note the candidate saying something critical about the Department of Education, and then extrapolate that said candidate would cut all funding and loans across the board. As is often the case with political ads, some of the claims are rather questionable.
In North Carolina, Democrats unveiled an ad attacking Republican Senate candidate Thom Tillis for supposedly not supporting refinancing student loans, implying this would skyrocket the cost of student loans. But the ad only references one news story for this claim, which reports that Tillis said something negative about a failed bill proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass).
This raised the eyebrows of fact-checkers, since Tillis’ support was irrelevant to the bill’s fate and Tillis has not actually said much about what he would support.
A centrist group in Georgia targeted Republican House candidate Rick Allen, airing an ad claiming he “would eliminate the federal student loan program.”
Allen objected to the ad, saying that ideally he would get rid of the Department of Education but maintain Pell Grants and student loans.
In another ad targeting Joni Ernst, the Republican Senate candidate in Iowa, Ernst is declared “just too extreme.” It features a clip of Ernst saying something about “closing the doors to the Department of Education.”
“Joni Ernst would eliminate federal student loans that we’ll need to afford college,” the ad continues. When PolitiFact investigated this claim, Ernst declined to clarify her stance on Pell Grants.
Inside Higher Ed also cites an illuminating study by the Wesleyan Media Project which found that education issues were often the fourth-most-mentioned issue in recent Democratic ads in House races, whereas it was not even in the top 12 issues for Republicans. And in both North Carolina and South Dakota, two states in tight Senate races, education was the number one issue for Democratic ads. 14 percent of Democratic ads mentioned education—a high number considering that 15 percent mentioned jobs, employment, and social security. Taxation was the most popular topic, at 27 percent.
