Brett Kavanaugh has now been the biggest story in American politics for more than two weeks. His contentious Supreme Court nomination hearings were followed by an allegation of sexual assault dating back to his time in high school.
We’re still in the middle of this story, but it’s always worth asking what the American people think. Specifically, I’ve rounded up a number of polls that will (hopefully) shed some light what voters thought of Kavanaugh before the allegations and how that has (or hasn’t) changed since.
Kavanaugh Polling Pre-Allegation
Shortly after Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing concluded, CNN published a dataset of polling numbers that compared Kavanaugh to past nominees. They weren’t great: The polls said that 37 percnet to 38 percent of respondents wanted the Senate to confirm Kavanaugh, while 39 percent to 40 percent wanted the upper chamber to vote against him. Most nominees poll better than this. Neil Gorsuch got a favorable response from 49 percent of respondents on the same question, and all of Barack Obama’s and George W. Bush’s nominees (with the exception of Harriet Miers) cracked 50 percent on this question in at least one poll.
So Kavanaugh didn’t start out with a ton of padding in his polling numbers. Some past nominees (e.g. Gorsuch, Kagan, Alito, Roberts, Ginsburg) appeared to have better numbers than the president who nominated them (that is, the percentage who wanted them confirmed outpaced the president’s approval rating in the closest Gallup poll). But Kavanaugh’s numbers started off roughly where Trump’s numbers were. And his raw numbers were closer to Robert Bork (the Senate denied his confirmation) and Harriett Miers (who withdrew relatively early in the process) than they were to other nominees.
Numbers like that don’t doom a nominee. In fact, as the hearings concluded Kavanaugh appeared to have enough support in the Senate to make it onto the court.
Kavanaugh Polling Post-Nomination
Late last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein released a statment saying she’d received a letter from a consitutent regarding Kavanaugh that she was turning over to federal authorities. On Sunday, Christine Blasey Ford came forward in the Washington Post to detail allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when they were both in high school in the early 1980s. The confirmation process has since been in a state of flux, where multiple parties are trying to figure out if Ford will testify, when and under what conditions that would happen and more.
Since then, multiple polls have been fielded and published. They paint a pretty murky picture of what’s going on.
A Huffington Post/YouGov poll showed that Kavanaugh’s post-allegation numbers are basically the same as his pre-allegation numbers. Ariel Edwards-Levy polled on Kavanaugh three times (one before the allegations were public, one before Ford’s identity was known, and one after more details were published) and found that 38 percent, 38 percent and 39 percent of respondents wanted their senator to vote to confirm Kavanaugh (the numbers were a bit different among adults, but there was still no real trend). There also wasn’t a clearly discernible trend in the percentage of registered voters who opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Ipsos, on the other hand, has seen a drop in Kavanaugh’s numbers. Their numbers show that opposition to Kavanaugh ticked up six points (up to 36 percent among all adults) between its latest survey and its previous poll.
Gallup also saw a bit of a decline for Kavanaugh, but those numbers suggest that the drop happened before the allegations became public. Gallup noted that the average Supreme Court nominee ends up seeing a modest drop in their poll numbers between the first and final survey, and their results are in line with that pattern.
