By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post (c) 2024
President Joe Biden isn’t the only one to pull a shocking and sudden reversal on pardoning his son Hunter Biden. So too, it seems, has the Democratic base.
As the dust settles on a pardon that the president and his White House repeatedly assured would not happen, new polling shows the Democrats suddenly embracing an idea they had strongly rejected before.
A new snap YouGov poll shows the pardon earns negative reviews overall. About half of American adults say they disapprove of the pardon, while about one-third approve. About twice as many Americans strongly disapprove (35 percent) as strongly approve (17 percent).
That’s a poor review on par with some of then-President Donald Trump’s more controversial pardons. (Trump pardoned an extraordinary number of allies and even his son-in-law’s father, Charles Kushner, whom he just recently picked for ambassador to France.)
But it’s a significantly better review than the idea of Biden pardoning his son previously got, when it was in the hypothetical realm. And the reason is clear: Democrats flip-flopped much like Biden did.
The poll shows more than six in 10 Democrats approve of the pardon at least “somewhat,” and only about two in 10 object to it.
That’s basically a full reversal from where Democrats were before. YouGov polling in September 2023 showed almost the exact same numbers, but reversed. More than six in 10 Democrats opposed such a pardon at least “somewhat,” while just more than two in 10 supported it.
An Economist/YouGov poll in June 2024 asked the question in a slightly different way: whether Biden shouldpardon his son, and requested a straight “yes” or “no” answer. Democrats chose “no” by a 67-15 margin.
The sudden support for the pardon on the left is also difficult to square with YouGov’s polling from August on the broader concept of a president pardoning family members. At the time, Democrats said by an 82 to 9 percent margin that this was inappropriate – a larger margin than Republicans.
So why does it even matter that Democrats have apparently so thoroughly reversed themselves?
For one, it could temper Democratic lawmakers’ objections if they know their party is generally on-board with the pardon. Democrats like Sen. Gary Peters (Michigan), Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and several House members have raised concerns about the pardon.
And secondly, it suggests the pardon might not be as big a stain on Biden’s legacy as it seemed it could be. Biden didn’t just pardon his son, but he did so after repeatedly saying he wouldn’t, and he gave Hunter Biden an extraordinarily broad pardon, historically speaking. These numbers suggest it’s a mark against the outgoing president, but not exactly a scandal.
And finally, the reversal reinforces how partisanship can rein in such matters – how ideas that are highly unpopular in the abstract can win significant support when your side actually does it.
Such tribalism could matter with the prospective pardons that some Democrats fear Biden just legitimized: the ones Trump has floated for those convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. (In actuality, Trump’s controversial pardon history suggests he probably didn’t feel the need for any additional justification, and it’s worth emphasizing that many Jan. 6 crimes go well beyond Hunter Biden’s.)
Polls show this idea has been very unpopular, and even many Republicans aren’t sold. A CNN poll in January showed 69 percent of American adults and even 46 percent of Republican-leaning Americans opposed the idea of pardoning most Jan. 6 convicts. And a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll a year ago showed just 26 percent of Americans and 42 percent of Republicans said punishments for Jan. 6 convicts were “too harsh.”
The larger stakes of Jan. 6 might suggest views could be more ingrained and harder to shift.
But Republicans have quite conveniently adjusted their views related to Trump and crime – and even the Capitol insurrection – plenty before, in Trump’s direction. And it could surely happen again.