Welcome to Pollapalooza, our occasional polling column.
For months, President Joe Biden was clear: Despite his constitutional right to pardon people of crimes, he would not issue a pardon for his son Hunter, who was convicted earlier this year for illegally purchasing a firearm and pleaded guilty to tax evasion and filing false tax returns. But on Dec. 1, he went back on his word, issuing a "Full and Unconditional Pardon" of the younger Biden. The pardon covered not only the crimes he's been convicted of, but also any "offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle were quick to condemn the pardon as self-serving and hypocritical, and the public's reaction hasn't been much better. According to a YouGov poll conducted on Dec. 2, only 34 percent of Americans approved of the president's decision to pardon his son, while 50 percent disapproved — including 35 percent who "strongly" disapproved.
Interestingly, though, that's a more divided reaction than a previous YouGov poll showed back in September 2023, when the idea of a Hunter Biden pardon was completely hypothetical. Back then, only 13 percent of Americans said they would support the president pardoning his son, and 72 percent said they would oppose it — including 56 percent who "strongly" opposed it.
If you dig into the polls' crosstabs, you can see that this shift was largely caused by Democrats. In the 2023 poll, Democrats opposed a Hunter Biden pardon 64 percent to 21 percent. But in this week's poll, those numbers were exactly reversed: 64 percent of Democrats approved of the pardon, and 21 percent disapproved.
Why the 180? It's possible that the election of President-elect Donald Trump caused Democrats to look at Hunter Biden's situation differently. Trump has promised to prosecute his political enemies, so Democrats may feel that Hunter Biden needs legal protection from being unfairly targeted. During his first term, Trump also pardoned several political allies and has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters during his second term, so Democrats may feel that Biden's pardon is mild in comparison. Democrats may also have been convinced by Joe Biden's argument in his pardon notice that Hunter Biden was treated more harshly just because he was the president's son.
But it's also possible that Democrats have gotten on board with the Hunter Biden pardon simply because the Democratic president did. Political science research is clear that voters change their opinions about things based on the cues of trusted elites. When Joe Biden was saying that he would "respect the judicial process" with regard to his son's conviction, Democrats agreed with him. When Biden changed his mind and issued the pardon, a lot of Democrats probably followed his cue.
And in this, Hunter Biden's is just like most other high-profile presidential pardons over the years. In a separate survey, YouGov asked Americans if they approved or disapproved of 18 specific pardons since the 1970s, and one consistent pattern was that Democrats tended to approve of pardons issued by Democratic presidents and Republicans tended to approve of pardons issued by Republican presidents. As it so often does, partisanship rules all — even in matters of criminal justice.
—Nathaniel Rakich
This year saw a major milestone for the transgender community: Democrat Sarah McBride was elected as the first openly transgender representative in the House, representing Delaware's at-large congressional district. In the wake of her election, South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a bill to ban transgender women from using women's restrooms in the U.S. Capitol, which she said was explicitly intended to target McBride. The issue caused some predictable controversy, with multiple members of the House issuing statements and Speaker Mike Johnson announcing a policy to bar transgender women from women's restrooms in the Capitol and House office buildings.
In the wake of all this controversy, we'd typically turn to the polls to help us sort out what people think about the incident and the people involved in it. Indeed, YouGov/The Economist asked respondents how they felt about McBride and Mace in their weekly survey after the dispute. According to the poll, Mace had a net favorability of 0, while McBride had a net favorability of +2, though only about half of respondents said they had an opinion of either woman.
But a look under the hood provides a bit of insight — and a note of caution — about interpreting polling data on relatively unknown public figures. Both politicians were assessed in what's known as a "favorability battery," in which a pollster shows respondents a list of people and asks if they have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of each. The battery here included 14 people, some of whom, like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are outspoken Trump allies. In fact, other than McBride and Mace, every name on the list was someone that Trump has nominated to a position in his upcoming administration. And it appears that respondents figured that out: Each person had higher favorability ratings among Trump voters than Harris voters. That included McBride, which may indicate respondents who hadn't actually heard of her before assumed she was affiliated with Trump's incoming administration, rather than a political figure who'd made the news for very different reasons.
While Trump voters may have been inclined to rate all of Trump's nominees positively, Harris voters appear to have done the opposite. According to this survey, McBride's favorability is underwater by 10 points among Harris voters, while she enjoys a positive 20 point net favorability among Trump voters. In addition, 46 percent of respondents to the survey gave an opinion of McBride, an implausibly large number claiming to be familiar with a freshly elected representative from one of America's smallest states.
This is just one example of a poll that appears to tell us one thing on the surface, but underneath it may be measuring something completely different. In this case, we see a significant number of respondents who appear to be answering the survey based entirely on perceived partisanship (we sometimes call this expressive responding). And while normally we might say to just "throw it in the average," in this case we can't: This is the only national survey we've seen that asked Americans how they feel about McBride. Unfortunately for us, it looks like we still don't really know.
—Mary Radcliffe
Americans have undoubtedly been feeling down on the state of the country throughout the last election cycle, but at least some are feeling more optimistic now that the election is over. In a CivicScience poll the week after the election, 46 percent of respondents said they were optimistic about the future of the country, up from the 38 percent who said the same in the spring of 2023. That change was driven largely by a big swing among Republicans: The week after the election, 63 percent said they felt very or somewhat optimistic, compared to just 32 percent last year. In comparison, optimism increased just 4 points among independents and decreased 12 points among Democrats.
Other recent polls on the national mood show even more drastic shifts within each party before and after the election, with Democrats and Republicans practically swapping positions on the same questions. For example, Trump's trademark Make America Great Again slogan fed off the increasingly prevalent idea that America's best days are in its past, but Democratic voters in a post-election YouGov/CBS News poll are now much more likely to agree with that sentiment than Republicans. For their part, Republicans seem confident Trump will make good on his MAGA pledge: In a turnabout from how they felt in October, more than two-thirds now say America's best days are in its future.
In other recent polling, the share of registered voters who think things in the U.S. are "generally headed in the right direction" remained relatively low (around 30 percent) in the months before and after the election, but that feeling has risen sharply among Republicans while plummeting among Democrats, most of whom now say the country is "off on the wrong track."
These patterns aren't unique to the 2024 election, though. For instance, YouGov/The Economist's regular tracking polls show that there was a huge bump in the share of Republicans who felt good about the country's direction right after Trump's 2016 victory, and an even bigger one after he took office the next January. The same was true for Democrats after Biden's win four years later.
Needless to say, it's pretty normal in today's highly polarized times for Americans' outlook for the country to correlate closely with whether their preferred party holds the presidency. But there are ways that Republicans' optimism and Democrats' pessimism this year does stand out. Notably, Democrats are particularly pessimistic about the future of their own party, while Republicans are riding high.
A mid-November survey by Pew Research found that Americans who identify with or lean toward the GOP felt better about their party's future than they ever have in the Trump era: A whopping 86 percent said they felt optimistic, compared to only 13 percent who felt pessimistic. In contrast, only 51 percent of Democrats said they felt optimistic about the future of their party, while 49 percent felt pessimistic. That's 10 points lower than the 61 percent who were still optimistic about the party after Trump's first win in 2016, and a drop of more than 30 points compared to 2020. So while Republicans try to put their optimism into action, Democrats look to be in for some soul searching.
—Tia Yang