WASHINGTON — The $1.3 trillion burden of student debt is becoming an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign as candidates court the millions of Americans grappling with the high cost of college.

Congressional Democrats are advocating for debt-free public higher education and pushing party front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton to take up the issue in her campaign.

White House hopefuls Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley have already backed the plan, with Sanders proposing his own federal program to make four-year public college free.

Republican contenders have not laid out any specific positions, but New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush have framed the issue as a barrier to economic mobility in recent speeches.

“We’re talking about over 40 million Americans who have student debt,” said Sarah Audelo of the Center for American Progress. “We have this multi-generational impact … and there has to be a conversation.”

The latest data from the New York Federal Reserve shows that 65 percent of student loans are held by Americans under age 39, while people age 40 to 59 hold another 30 percent.

The issue weighs heaviest on the minds of millennials, who have endured soaring college costs that forced many to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

A Harvard University Institute of Politics poll found that 57 percent of people under 30 believe that student debt is a major problem for young people.

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, said he believes the issue of student debt is as important to millennials as “war and peace issues” were to baby boomers.

“A part of the reason student debt is so important for Democrats is that it’s a crucial motivator to get younger people to vote,” Garin said. “Student debt is often the defining economic fact of their lives.”

People 18 to 34 account for about one-fourth of the voting-age population.

While that group largely sat out the midterm elections, their votes proved critical in the last two presidential elections.

Although it is early in the campaign season, Democrats are making a clear play for the millennial vote. They have introduced a slate of resolutions calling for the elimination of student debt at public colleges, the increase of federal grant aid and reduction of interest rates on student loans. It is part of a larger push to promote debt-free college as a campaign issue.

“Student debt will be a central issue in the 2016 elections, both at the presidential election and the congressional level,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told reporters at a Howard University event in April. “There are two problems that have to be solved: the high cost of college education and huge outstanding student loan burden. And we need to go after both of them.”

The debt-free college initiative is based on a plan sketched out by Demos, a liberal think tank.

It calls for the federal government to award grants to states that increase spending on higher education and increase need-based grant aid.

That way, fewer students would have to take on high debt loads to attend public colleges.

Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, called the plan “a return to the promise of higher education as a public good.”

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