Americans Think the Senate Should be Prioritizing Coronavirus Relief, Not a Supreme Court Confirmation

By Brian Schaffner Tufts University

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing sparked a heated debate over when the Senate should confirm her successor on the Supreme Court. This week, we included a supplemental battery of questions on the Data for Progress coronavirus tracking poll to gauge Americans’ attitudes towards this process. These questions were designed by students in Tufts University’s “Polling the 2020 Election” class.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to push through a confirmation before the election, even while the Senate has still failed to pass a second coronavirus relief package. When we asked Americans what the Senate’s top priority should be during the next few months, they overwhelmingly said that the Senate should prioritize “passing new legislation to deal with the economic and health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic” rather than confirming a new Supreme Court justice. Nearly two-thirds of Americans want the Senate to pass pandemic relief while just one-in-five think confirming a new justice should be the top priority of lawmakers.

The preference for prioritizing coronavirus relief was strong even when partisanship is taken into account. Eighty-six percent of voters who self-identify as Democrats want the Senate to focus on coronavirus relief. Voters who self-identify as Republicans, meanwhile, are evenly divided on these competing priorities (44% say the priority should be coronavirus relief while 42% want to prioritize a confirmation vote). Independents prefer action on coronavirus relief by more than a 40-percentage-point margin (59% coronavirus relief to 11% judicial confirmation).

We also asked Americans whether they thought the Senate should vote to confirm a new justice before the election or if a vote should wait until after November 3rd. Just 32% think that the Senate should vote on confirmation before election day while over half think that the confirmation vote should wait until after the election (16% were not sure).

Finally, many have noted that this debate, like other recent partisan battles over confirmations, is likely to lead Americans to abandon their view that the Supreme Court is an impartial decision making body. We asked voters how they think the Supreme Court has made its decisions in recent years. Thirty-five percent of Americans say that they think “the Supreme Court makes its decisions based on an impartial reading of the law” while 38% say that “the Supreme Court makes its decisions based on political preferences” (33% said they were unsure).

Methodology

The Data for Progress coronavirus tracking poll is fielded each week using respondents recruited via Lucid. This week’s poll was fielded on September 22nd and includes a sample of 827 American adults. Post-stratification weights are implemented to make each week’s sample nationally representative of American adults by gender, age, region, education, race, and the interaction of education and race. The margin of error for this week’s survey is ± 4 percentage points.

The questions on the Supreme Court for this week’s survey were developed by students in Tufts University’s “Polling the 2020 Election” class. Special thanks in particular to Aly Haver, Josh Hochberg, Lucas Pyle, and Aadhya Shivakumar.