Older Democrats in particular, she said, “have this tendency to view the court as a potential force for good.” This is reflected in the data: A 2021 study Sen co-authored showed that Democrats consistently underestimate how conservative the Supreme Court really is. Those positive feelings might be carrying over to other parts of the government, Ura said, particularly parts like the Supreme Court that weren’t generating bad headlines at the time.īut looking beyond the politics of the midterms, “Democrats tend to be, by nature, more passive supporters of the court, in the sense that they’re pro-institutionalist,” said Maya Sen, a professor at Harvard University who studies the court. And some states, like Michigan, enshrined abortion protections into their state constitutions, providing crucial victories for Democrats.
Even though they lost control of the House of Representatives, they gained a seat in the Senate and broadly overperformed expectations across the board, generating a slew of positive coverage for the party.
Why have Democrats suddenly become more favorable toward the high court? According to Ura, “aggregate support for the Supreme Court is tied strongly to support for the government in general.” After an election season dominated by the Dobbs decision, he said, Democrats are likely feeling better about the government overall. Although this is partially due to Republicans approving of the court at slightly lower rates, this shrinking is primarily because the Supreme Court’s approval rating among Democrats has increased by 10 points since mid-August 2022. At its peak last September, during the height of the midterm election season, the gap between Republican and Democratic approval of the court was 39 points.Ĭuriously, though, since the midterms, the partisan gap has shrunk by almost half - though it remains much larger (25 points) than it was in early 2021. From there, the percentage of Republicans who approved of the court surged, while the percentage of Democrats plummeted. At the beginning of March 2021, Democrats and Republicans approved of the court at essentially the same rate: 46 and 45 percent, respectively. The other major trend in public opinion of the court that has emerged over the past few years is a yawning partisan divide. As high-salience events like Dobbs get further in the rearview mirror, “people's emotional political reactions to them decay.” And in the past several months, Ura said, as the Supreme Court has been hearing cases rather than handing down a sequence of unpopular decisions, voters’ disapproval has relaxed.
“One thing we know about voters in general is that they're pretty myopic,” said Joseph Ura, a political scientist at Texas A&M University who has written about support for the high court. But the reason could be pretty simple: Americans just aren’t thinking about the decision too much anymore.
This improvement might seem surprising, since Dobbs remains in effect and GOP-led states have used it as recently as last month to pass an array of unpopular abortion bans and restrictions.
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