Fifty-six percent of general election voters view President Joe Biden’s speech, where he cast Republicans as “threats to the foundations of our republic,” as unacceptable, a Tuesday Trafalgar Group poll found.

The poll asked respondents, “What is your opinion of President Biden’s recent primetime address to the nation in which he accused his political opponents of representing ‘an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’?”

Fifty-six say the speech “represents a dangerous in rhetoric and is designed to incite conflict amounts Americans.” Only 35 percent say the speech was “acceptable campaign messaging that is to be expected in an election year.” Nearly 8 percent have no opinion.

Moreover, nearly 20 percent of Democrats viewed the speech negatively. Sixty-two percent of independents agreed that it represented “a dangerous in rhetoric and is designed to incite conflict amounts Americans.” Eighty-nine percent of Republicans oppose the speech.

The poll sampled 1,084 likely general election voters from September 2-5 with a 2.9 percent margin of error.

The polling comes after the Biden administration claimed the official White House speech, which represents the official position of the Biden administration, was not a political speech heading into the midterm elections. “Democracy is not a partisan or political issue,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Chris Meagher tweeted after the speech received poor reviews from the establishment media.

The following day after Thursday’s speech, Biden tried to walk back his dark speech that portrayed the Republicans as extremists who threatened the United States. “I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” Biden replied when asked by reporters.

“When people voted for Donald Trump and support him now, they weren’t voting for attacking the Capitol. They weren’t voting for overruling an election,” he backtracked. “They were voting for a philosophy that he put forward.”

Biden’s backtracking came after images from his speech went viral. The images show an angry president, flacked by Marines, with red lighting in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.