While Tuesday’s State of the Union address from President Joe Biden dutifully dug into some hot-button, partisan issues facing the U.S. today, in its analysis of his performance, “Fox & Friends” determined that that were still some things that both all voters could agree on. Among them: that some Republicans’ heckling of Biden crossed a line.
Spotlighting feedback and figures gathered by communications consultancy Maslansky+Partners, its president Lee Carter sat with Ainsley Earhardt Wednesday to gauge how viewers’ reactions to Biden’s discussion of issues like inflation and fentanyl at the border fared across party lines of Democrat, Republican and independent.
Highlighting the spiking threat of fentanyl nationwide was “a really rare moment where Republicans and Democrats come together” in their support, Carter said. But what they “didn’t necessarily like” was what she called “Republican crosstalk.”
“We heard that from both sides,” Carter said. “You can see that the Democrats didn’t like that either. But the independents were really turned off by the whole exchange, and that’s one of the themes you saw for the night. The way that the Republicans behaved really did turn off a lot of independent voters.”
Earhardt responded, saying, “It’s interesting that Republicans even told you they didn’t like the cross-exchange. A lot of people I’ve talked to liked it, the ones who were Republicans, because they liked the fact that they had a change to refute what he was saying. They said he wasn’t telling the truth.”
While there were “a fair number of people” that responded positively to the so-called crosstalk – “you saw a bump in the dials,” Carter said – she explained that taking a step back showed that it wasn’t the norm among even Republican voters.
“When I looked at the verbatims, what people were saying over and over again was there should be some amount of decorum,” she said. “You can fight back, you can slap back. There’s a lot of other times and places to do it. There’s other ways to do it. They just didn’t like this sort of colosseum feel.”
You can watch the full “Fox & Friends” breakdown with Carter in the video above.