For the second time in less than two weeks, we’ve seen a historic criminal conviction in the 2024 campaign. First came Donald Trump’s conviction in Manhattan — unprecedented for a former president and current major presidential candidate — on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. On Tuesday came the unprecedented conviction of a president’s son — on three felony gun charges.
The Trump conviction doesn’t appear to have moved the needle much politically so far. And the Hunter Biden conviction, which is more tenuously tied to voters’ choices, appears unlikely to do so, despite years of Republicans trying to drag down President Biden with his son’s problems.
The first thing to note is that the felony charges against Hunter Biden have no real proximity to President Biden. While Republicans have scrutinized the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings and have sought in vain to tie them to the president, the charges in Delaware had to do with Hunter Biden’s illegally purchasing a gun he was prohibited from buying and owning as a drug user.
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Voters could, hypothetically, view the son’s conviction as a reflection on the president, but it’s more of a leap to make a connection.
And Americans don’t generally make that leap — on this or other Hunter Biden issues.
A February Reuters/Ipsos poll showed a plurality of Americans (46 percent to 39 percent) described Hunter Biden’s broader legal problems as “independent of and unrelated to his father’s service as president.” Just 22 percent of independent voters said that statement was “not at all believable” — basically, that they definitely did reflect on the president.
The same poll showed 23 percent of Americans said they were less likely to vote for President Biden because of his son’s legal problems.
But those findings deserve some context.
They suggest that it was overwhelmingly Republican-leaning voters who said the son’s problems made them less likely to vote for Biden — people unlikely to vote for him in the first place. Just 25 percent of independents said Hunter Biden’s legal problems made them less likely to support the president, and just 19 percent said it made them “much less likely.” Many independents are reliable votes for one party or another, despite the label.
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It’s also notable that these questions were about Hunter Biden’s broader legal problems. Most voters probably had other allegations in mind — ones Republicans have probed as part of their unsuccessful impeachment inquiry of President Biden — that weren’t tested in the Delaware federal court.
But even those don’t appear nearly as electorally troubling to Americans as Trump’s legal problems.
As many as half of Americans have said they believe Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings were illegal, according to Fox News polling last year, but the same poll showed fewer than 4 in 10 said President Biden’s alleged connections to his son’s business dealings were.
Again, this would seem to be largely people who were probably already against Biden in the 2024 campaign. Just 33 percent of independents and 29 percent of moderates said Biden had done something illegal in relation to his son.
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Those numbers are far shy of the majorities — including of independents — who have said they believe Trump broke the law in his various criminal cases.
The prevailing reaction among Republicans on Tuesday was not so much hailing the verdict as claiming that this case was a smokescreen — suggesting that they know voters aren’t particularly concerned about this case. They decried the fact that Hunter Biden hadn’t been charged with worse crimes, including allegedly acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
“This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement after the verdict.
(Despite Republicans’ attempts to attack the “Biden Crime Family,” they haven’t directly tied President Biden to anything illegal, and they can’t even get enough votes from Republican lawmakers to impeach him.)
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That brings us to the other major question here — and perhaps even the biggest one, given the verdict itself appears unlikely to move votes: What does this mean for perceptions of the legal process that Republicans have become so fond of attacking?
Democrats have argued that Hunter Biden’s conviction undercuts those arguments, because it shows that even the Democratic president’s own son isn’t immune from being charged and convicted. (Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas have also recently been indicted.) Democrats including President Biden on Tuesday emphasized respect for the legal process in an obvious attempt to contrast that with Trump’s continued attacks on pretty much everyone involved in his criminal cases.
To the extent that argument makes sense with voters, it could certainly tamp down Trump’s efforts to claim a “weaponized” justice system — claims that thus far don’t seem to have penetrated beyond Trump’s base.
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But there is some risk here in Americans regarding Hunter Biden as having gotten off somewhat easy. In addition to the half of voters who have said they believe he broke the law with his foreign business dealings, polls have repeatedly shown concerns on this front.
The February Reuters poll showed 59 percent of Americans — including 32 percent of Democrats — said they believed Hunter Biden was “receiving favorable treatment from U.S. prosecutors” because he’s President Biden’s son. A 55 percent majority said after a plea deal fell apart last year that Justice Department’s treatment of him was “not tough enough.”
It’s possible those numbers will drop now that Hunter Biden has actually been convicted of crimes. He also faces a trial on tax charges that is due to begin in September in California. But mostly, this would appear to be a nonevent in the eyes of voters.
