Poll: Just 27% of Americans oppose confirming Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court

Far more Americans still support (42%) than oppose (27%) Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll. Nearly one-third of Americans (31%) say they’re not sure whether they support or oppose Jackson.

Jackson’s nomination took a major step forward Monday when Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced it to a floor vote scheduled for later this week. With unanimous Democratic support — and at least one Republican backer — Jackson is widely expected to be confirmed to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.

Yet even as Jackson continued her steady march toward confirmation, rising partisanship and polarization was evident Monday when all 11 Republicans on the evenly divided Judiciary Committee voted to block her nomination — forcing Senate Democrats to file a special procedural motion to advance her nomination to the full Senate.

That partisan divide is also apparent in the new Yahoo News/YouGov survey of 1,618 U.S. adults, which was conducted from March 31 to April 4.

Right before President Biden nominated Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, a full 57% of Republicans said she was “qualified” to serve when shown a summary of her attributes and experiences. But after two months of GOP attacks culminating in last week’s contentious Senate confirmation hearings, that number has plummeted to just 31% — meaning that nearly half of Republicans who considered Jackson qualified in February no longer do so today.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a member of the committee who voted last year to confirm Jackson to her current position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, went so far as to say Republicans would have refused to even consider Biden’s nominee if they controlled the Senate.

“If we get back the Senate and we are in charge of this body and there is judicial openings, we will talk to our colleagues on the other side,” Graham said. “But if we are in charge, she would not have been before this committee.”

A few weeks before Biden nominated Jackson, Yahoo News and YouGov asked respondents to assess her qualifications, listing her as 51 years old, a graduate of Harvard Law School, a former clerk for a Supreme Court justice, and a current judge on the D.C. Circuit Court. In response, 69% of Americans said Jackson was qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, including 57% of Republicans.

At the time, just 11% of Americans — and just 19% of Republicans — said that Jackson was not qualified.

When asked the same question today, however — in the immediate aftermath of confirmation hearings that saw Republican senators falsely accusing Biden’s nominee of leniency for child porn offenders and questioning whether she believes “babies are racist” — respondents revert to their predictable partisan corners. (Given that Jackson is now a more familiar figure, they were not provided with another summary of her résumé, which may have influenced some of the shift.)

Democrats, for their part, have barely budged, with 77% now considering Jackson qualified versus 81% then. More independents continue to consider her qualified (41%) than unqualified (31%), even though they previously considered her qualified by a greater margin (64% to 11%).

But it is Republicans who have moved the most, flipping from 57% qualified versus 19% unqualified in February to 31% qualified versus 47% unqualified today.

Although Americans as a whole are still 15 percentage points more likely to support Jackson’s confirmation, the reversal among Republicans illustrates how quickly and effectively the political process can transform perceptions of something as seemingly objective as “qualifications,” at least among partisans.

These same partisan patterns also surface in views about the confirmation process itself. A full 41% of Democrats, for instance, say the questioning during Jackson’s hearings was “mostly inappropriate” versus just 16% who say it was “mostly appropriate.”

In contrast, Democrats now say the opposite about the 2018 hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault by a former classmate after being nominated to the high court by then-President Donald Trump. Just 10% of Democrats recall the Kavanaugh hearings as mostly inappropriate; 46% remember them as mostly appropriate.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans disagree, claiming by a 49% to 8% margin that the Jackson hearings were mostly appropriate — and by a 46% to 11% margin that the Kavanaugh hearings were mostly inappropriate.

Later this week Jackson will likely scrape by with minimal bipartisan backing — much like her recent predecessors Kavanaugh (who was confirmed by a 50-48 Senate vote), Neil Gorsuch (54-45) and Amy Coney Barrett (52-48), who were all nominated by Trump and confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate.

Earlier nominees such as Breyer (87-9) and Chief Justice John Roberts (78-22) attracted far more support from the opposing party — as did former Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, both Republican appointees who sailed through an earlier, less partisan process without a single “nay.”

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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,618 U.S. adults interviewed online from March 31 to April 4, 2022. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2020 presidential vote (or non-vote) and voter registration status. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.7%.