Last updated on September 24th, 2018 at 06:37 am
A new poll published by USA Today shows Donald Trump‘s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh to be the most unpopular nominee in history. Clearly the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh have not helped his standing in the eyes of the American public.
Amid these allegations of sexual assault, people surveyed said Kavanaugh should not be confirmed by a margin of 40 percent to 31 percent. This is an unprecedented level of disapproval for a nominee to the nation’s high court.
This is the first time a plurality of Americans have opposed a Supreme Court nominee since polling on the issue began several decades ago.
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Americans are divided not just by political party but also by gender, and this is the biggest reason that Kavanaugh‘s favorability ratings are under water.
By a double-digit margin women are more likely than men to believe the story being told by Dr. Christine Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of an attempted rape while they were at a house party in Maryland during their high school years.
Women believe Ford by a margin of 35 percent to 21 percent while more men believe Kavanaugh‘s denials by a margin of 37 percent to 28 percent.
If there is a reaction against Republican candidates because of Kavanaugh‘s nomination to the Supreme Court, and if there is a Big Blue Wave in November, it will be because of women voters turning out in droves to express their displeasure at the ballot box.
On the question of whether or not Judge Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the high court, women oppose his confirmation by 20 points, 43 percent opposed compared to just 23 percent in favor.
On the other hand, men support Kavanaugh‘s confirmation by four points, 40 percent to 36 percent.
Thus the poll shows a 24 percentage point “gender gap” on the question of Kavanaugh‘s ultimate approval by the Senate for the Supreme Court. This is not good news for Republicans, who are persisting with Kavanaugh‘s nomination regardless of public opinion.
Cliff Young, president of Ipsos, the company that conducted the survey, said that both gender and party affiliation were the drivers of the poll results.
“With the battle over the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court being charged by sexual assault accusations and at the almost one-year anniversary of the start of #MeToo, you’d think that America would be split by gender on this. And we are, but our new poll shows that more than gender, party is the main driver of people’s point of view about this fight, another sign of our highly tribal times.”
According to Young, just 9 percent of Democrats support Kavanaugh‘s confirmation, compared with 70 percent of Republicans.
The negative poll results for Kavanaugh were consistent with other opinion surveys that were conducted earlier in the week.
Brett Kavanaugh, and his proposed nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, are getting less popular with Americans every day. GOP senators would love to get Kavanaugh’s confirmation behind them, but that is not possible so long as they fail to allow Dr. Christine Ford to tell her full story, and so long as they refuse to allow the FBI to fully investigate her allegations.
Kavanaugh’s nomination has gone from a sure thing to a disaster in just one week, and the Republican Party has only itself to blame.
I am a lifelong Democrat with a passion for social justice and progressive issues. I have degrees in writing, economics and law from the University of Iowa.
