For all the ink that has been spilled describing former President Donald Trump‘s problems with suburban college-educated voters, one would think the former president and likely Republican nominee is headed to a blowout loss in November.
Given the narrative, one would presume that there is a groundswell of support for President Joe Biden, Trump’s likely general election opponent, and that the Democratic Party base is willing to crawl over hot coals and broken glass to vote for him.
But when Biden took the stage this week for two campaign events, he was interrupted by hecklers from his own side. The first was a rally in Virginia focused on abortion, and the second was at an event where he was receiving the endorsement of the United Auto Workers union. Both heckling incidents were from pro-Palestinian protesters who objected to Biden’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas.
While the president’s surrogates can try to chalk up these incidents as unrepresentative of the Democratic base, the hecklers’ dissatisfaction with the president is far more reflective of his voters than he would care to admit.
Biden’s approval rating among voters has been negative since the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 and sits at 39% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. In a recent YouGov-Economist poll, Biden’s approval rating among Democratic voters is at 84%, and among those who describe themselves as liberal, it is 75%. (For what it’s worth, Trump has similar approval ratings from Republicans and conservatives.)
This might not sound alarming on its face. After all, the overwhelming majority of liberal and Democratic voters approve of the president’s job. But elections are won on the margins, and if a candidate’s support among his own base slips only slightly, it could prove fatal in a general election.
Biden has trailed Trump in the national polling average since October and has not led the average with any consistency since early September. And while polls are not necessarily predictive, they do show there is widespread discontent with the president, no matter how he tries to spin it.
Biden has spent his entire term in office and even before trying to cultivate the impression that he is a pragmatic liberal who can work across the aisle with Republicans, but his record has largely said otherwise. Domestically, he has angered independents by governing largely as a stalwart progressive. But abroad, he has largely followed standard liberal foreign policy, including embracing Israel, and in doing so, has infuriated his progressive base.
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The Biden campaign can brush off the pro-Palestinian hecklers disrupting the president’s events all they want, but that won’t change the reality that those angry protesters come from his base of support.
The fact is the president has alienated swing voters through his disastrous governance and his base through his occasional moderation. If Biden can’t consolidate support among his ideological base, including from the crowd that disrupted his recent events, his reelection prospects might be doomed.