While President Joe Biden has been making overtures to more liberal Democrats, he may have undercut himself with his party’s centrists and independents before November.
But Biden acting as consoler in chief in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Thursday after the shootout deaths of three U.S. Marshal fugitive task force members and a local police officer could mark the start of him making amends.
Biden won the 2020 Democratic nomination as a self-described centrist, but has since adopted more liberal policies, in part as a peace offering to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and his supporters after the primary. Four years later, the more vocal Left remains influential within the party, creating challenges for Biden as he tries to keep “the disparate factions” of his coalition together, according to Northeastern University political science professor Costas Panagopoulos.
“Biden could conceivably alienate centrist Democrats with policies designed to appeal to the left flank, like student loan forgiveness or even efforts to combat climate change,” Panagopoulos told the Washington Examiner. “Recent polls suggest the defection rate among moderate Democrats is more pronounced than among more liberal voters, including young Americans.”
But, for Panagopoulos, the problem for Biden is he cannot “afford to lose much support from either faction.” Former President Donald Trump does lead Biden by an average of 2 percentage points in national polls, according to RealClearPolitics.
Dan Schnur, communications director for Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain‘s 2000 presidential campaign, agreed Biden has to tend to his base, but contended the issue of abortion access may not be “enough” to do it.
“The flip side to that is the border,” Schnur, now a University of Southern California professor, told the Washington Examiner. “Once the numbers of migrants start rising again later this spring, it will be interesting to see if he finally issues those executive orders.”
Simultaneously, people in the political center are “almost always the ones who make or break elections,” so Biden would be “smart” to pitch himself to those voters as well, according to Middlebury College political science professor Bert Johnson.
Centrist Democrats and independents provided Biden with an edge over Trump in the 2020 election. Not only did Biden outperform Trump with independents, 52% to 43%, but he also overperformed with conservative Democrats compared to Trump with liberal Republicans, 91% to 79%, according to Pew Research Center.
The demographic is poised to be pivotal again, but a YouGov-Economist poll this week found Biden’s approval among survey respondents who identified as centrists was 42%, down from 56% in January 2021 after his inauguration. His disapproval among centrists was 52%, up from 28% three years ago.
“The other important dynamic here, though, is attention: those on the extremes pay closer attention to politics and feel more passionately about a wider range of issues,” Middlebury College’s Johnson told the Washington Examiner.
“In this election cycle, the more centrist voters care most about the economy and much less about anything else,” he said. “The risk in attending to the left flank, I think, is less about the specific issue positions and more about risking being seen as not focusing on the economy, the top issue for most voters, Democrat and Republican alike.”
To Johnson’s point, centrists told YouGov-Economist pollsters this week their No. 1 priority is inflation and consumer prices (26%), followed by jobs and the economy (11%), healthcare (11%), and immigration (10%).
Biden’s trip to North Carolina, the battleground state Trump won in 2020 by his narrowest margin, was to pay his respects after the four law enforcement officers were killed in Charlotte this week by Terry Clark Hughes Jr., 39, as they tried to serve felony arrest warrants on him. He was also scheduled to underscore his infrastructure spending in nearby Wilmington.
“You represent the best of all of us, and I want to thank you,” Biden told a crowd later in Wilmington.
But the closed-door meeting in Charlotte was also an indirect reminder of Biden’s more centrist policies on, for example, police reform, which rankled liberals as they called for police budgets to be defunded but earned him the support of centrists concerned about crime. It, too, coincided with criticism of his response to widespread college campus protests over the Israel–Hamas war and for not attending the funeral of New York Police Department officer Jonathan Diller, who was shot dead last month during a traffic stop in Queens. Trump made an appearance at the Diller funeral, held the week of Biden’s million-dollar fundraiser with former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
“I understand that President Biden historically has spoken very forcefully about antisemitism, but this week he’s not,” one reporter asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “He’s MIA. Is he that worried about losing the youth vote with these protesters?”
“The president has taken a lot of policy actions here that he knows that young people care about,” Jean-Pierre replied.
Citing student debt and climate change, Jean-Pierre added: “What we’re going to do is continue to take actions that we believe helps all Americans in all communities.”
To that end, Biden announced this week he was canceling another $6.1 billion in student debt, this round for 317,000 borrowers who were enrolled at the Art Institutes, a private for-profit system of art schools, which closed last year after accreditation complaints and lawsuits. The announcement raises his total forgiveness to $160 billion for 4.6 million borrowers.
“While my predecessor looked the other way when colleges defrauded students and borrowers, I promised to take this on directly to provide borrowers with the relief they need and deserve,” Biden wrote in a statement.
Then on Thursday, Biden declared he was expanding the San Gabriel Mountains and Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, protecting another 120,000 acres in California and public access to them.
“Since their first day in office, President Biden and Vice President Harris have delivered on the most ambitious climate and conservation agenda in history,” the White House said in a separate statement.
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The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has projected Biden’s student loan cancellation proposals could cost taxpayers between $870 billion and $1.4 trillion.
“President Biden’s continued student loan ‘cancellation’ scheme not only incentivizes skyrocketing tuition, but also punishes working-class taxpayers, exacerbating our nation’s debt and deficit crisis in the process,” the committee wrote in a statement.