Polling guru Nate Silver dragged President Biden through the mud after the commander-in-chief pardoned his son Hunter on Sunday night — telling voters to abandon every Democrat who doesn’t likewise criticize and reject the “selfish” move.
“A selfish and senile old man,” the founder of the FiveThirtyEight polling aggregator wrote of Biden, 82, in a scathing series of criticisms on X minutes after the sweeping clemency announcement.
Silver — who said he voted for Biden’s successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election — also told voters to boycott every Democrat who doesn’t disagree with Biden’s pardon over the next two days.
“Don’t vote for any Democrat in 2028 who doesn’t repudiate the pardon within 48 hours,” the enraged polling Nostradamus wrote.
“I’m not saying this is going to be the decisive issue of 2026/28 etc. Probably second tier. But both the ethically *and politically* correct behavior is to call it out. Stop being so afraid of your own shadow,” Silver added.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis was the first Democrat to publicly denounce the move, accusing the commander-in-chief of having “put his family ahead of the country.”
“This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation. When you become President, your role is Pater familias of the nation,” Polis posted on X Sunday night.
Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) joined the growing chorus, rejecting Biden’s notion that his son was the target of “a politically-motivated prosecution.”
“Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers,” Stanton tweeted.
Leading Democrats on Capitol Hill have yet to issue statements — including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).
The president and his staff repeatedly insisted that he would not be issuing his son a pardon or lessen his sentence after Hunter was convicted of gun charges and pleaded guilty to tax crimes earlier this year — but made the about-face Sunday to pardon him for all offenses between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 1, 2024.
That includes any crimes which the first son may have committed but had not yet been charged for.
Biden claimed Hunter — who was facing sentencing hearings on Dec. 13 in Delaware for the three-count gun conviction and on Dec. 16 in California for the nine-count tax case — was only targeted because he was the president’s son.
“There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution,” Biden said in a statement. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
The pardon — covering more than 10 years and not limited to a single crime — is one of the most comprehensive pardons in US history.
The period extending back to 2014 covers the first son’s time serving on the board of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma Holdings, where he earned up to $1 million per year while his vice president dad oversaw the Eastern European nation as part of his policy portfolio in Washington.
Silver said the “White House consistently lied about” Biden not weighing a pardon of his son — even after former President Donald Trump won re-election.
“Biden’s stubborn insistence on running for reelection was perhaps the singular most important factor in Trump 2.0, and now he’s kicking salt in the wound of the party brand he helped to destroy,” Silver wrote.
