At the start of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court hearings last week, Republicans made a solemn promise: They would not treat her as badly as Democrats had treated Brett M. Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearings — a set of circumstances Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) called “one of the lowest moments in the history of this [Senate Judiciary] committee.”
The reviews are in. And not only do Americans support Jackson’s confirmation significantly more than they supported other recent nominees — they also view Republicans’ handling of it about as poorly as they view Democrats’ handling of Kavanaugh, if not worse.
A Quinnipiac University poll this week was the latest to show relatively strong support for Jackson’s confirmation: 51 percent supported it, while 30 percent opposed it. Support for her is higher than it was for the confirmations of Trump’s last two nominees, including Kavanaugh, whose confirmation Americans opposed. A CNN poll showed Americans opposed it by as much as double digits.
Also relevant, though, is how we got to that point.
It’s true that, even as Americans opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, they generally disliked how Democrats handled his confirmation hearings — specifically, it seems, their handling of decades-old sexual misconduct allegations. The CNN poll showed 56 percent gave them negative reviews, while just 36 percent gave them positive ones.
But the reviews of how Republicans approached Jackson’s hearings — and seemingly her record on child pornography cases, the main line of attack — are quite poor. Just 27 percent of Americans approve of their approach, compared to 52 percent who disapprove. That’s a 25-point gap, compared with the 20-point gap in the CNN poll for Democrats and Kavanaugh. (There are also more undecideds this time, perhaps reflecting that Jackson’s hearings received less attention.)
Across both cases, independents viewed the opposition party’s conduct similarly: On Kavanaugh they disapproved of Democrats 58-30, and with Jackson they disapprove of Republicans 54-25.
If there’s a difference between the two confirmations — beyond the public’s support for the nominee — it’s that neither side came out of the Kavanaugh hearings with good reviews. In fact, Republicans’ handling of it was viewed in a similarly negative light as Democrats’. But when it comes to Jackson, Democrats earned more positive reviews (42 percent) than negative ones (34 percent). So this isn’t just a matter of people simply disliking all politicians.
The very important question from there is why people disapproved of the GOP’s handling of Jackson’s hearings. It’s nearly 2-to-1 negative, after all, because many in their own party didn’t approve of their tactics. Just over half (52 percent) of Republicans give the thumbs-up, while 26 percent disapprove.
Does that mean even Republicans thought their party went after Jackson too hard on her record as a district judge in child pornography cases (when in fact her record was rather unremarkable)?
Again, the comparison to Democrats’ handling of Kavanaugh is instructive. There, too, 26 percent of the opposition party disapproved of their own side’s handling of the matter. But approval was significantly higher — 67 percent. So intraparty reviews are, on net, more negative for the GOP’s handling of Jackson than they were for Democrats’ handling of Kavanaugh.
And more Republicans support Jackson than Democrats did Kavanaugh. While Democrats opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation 91-7, about 1 in 5 Republicans (21 percent) say Jackson should be confirmed, and a relatively small 60 percent oppose her confirmation. If people like Jackson more than Kavanaugh, their threshold for feeling she was mistreated is probably easier to cross.
But perhaps it’s also likely that many Republicans wish their side had fought Jackson even harder. There are many unknowns in the data.
All in all, though, it doesn’t appear the American public views Republicans as having raised the level of discourse when it came to Jackson’s hearings.