Poll: Public opinion of Supreme Court sags over past year

The Supreme Court’s standing with the American public has dipped over the past year, as the high court and its makeup have taken on greater prominence in fractious political debates.

Sixty percent of Americans approve of the job the court is doing, according to a poll released Wednesday by Marquette University Law School. That’s down 6 points from a similar survey conducted in September 2020 just days before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Close to 40 percent disapproved of the Supreme Court’s job performance, according to Wednesday’s poll, up from 33 percent nearly a year. The court was still the most trusted of the three branches of the federal government, an image it has long sought to cultivate by positioning itself as above the partisan fray.

Independents were slightly more inclined to support the Supreme Court, with 61 percent approving of its job performance versus 57 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Democrats. However, that fell within the poll’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

GOP respondents’ support for the court was down substantially from last September, when it registered 80 percent job approval, while the results for independents and Democrats were largely unchanged.

Ginsburg’s death set off a monthlong sprint by then-President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans to install Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court in the lead-up to the November presidential election and secure a 6-3 conservative majority on the bench. Barrett was Trump’s third Supreme Court confirmation in four years, more than his predecessor President Barack Obama had in eight, and it has fanned a pressure campaign on the left to get Democrats and liberal judges to think more strategically about judicial vacancies.

Much of this effort has been directed at Justice Stephen Breyer, who turns 83 later this month and was put on the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton, though the justice said in mid-July that he had yet to make plans to retire. Axios reported on Monday that President Joe Biden and some of his top advisers think it is unwise to try to lean on Breyer so that the vacancy can be filled while Democrats have control of the Senate.

The pollsters posed the question two ways, one to each half of the randomized sample. When asked generally whether justices time their retirement based on who controls the White House and Senate, 41 percent of Democratic respondents said they should, compared with only 16 percent of Republicans.

When survey takers more specifically described Breyer’s situation, Democratic support shot up to 58 percent while Republican and independent opposition softened somewhat.

Ironically, Breyer was also the least known of all nine sitting Supreme Court justices, with 43 percent saying they had never heard of him and another 33 percent saying they didn’t know enough to form an opinion of him.

Respondents were split on whether to alter the size of the Supreme Court, with 51 percent opposing expansion and 48 percent in favor of it. However, only 26 percent of Republicans supported expansion, compared with 73 percent of Democrats — signifying which side voters stand to benefit given the current composition of the court.

Marquette’s pollsters conducted the survey July 16-26 among 1,010 people.