Roughly half of Americans now distrust the Supreme Court while about a quarter express no confidence at all in it—an alarming development for the once-hallowed institution that corresponds directly with the court's rightward shift over the past year and a half, according to fresh polling.
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted immediately after the leak of the draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade found that 50% of registered voters expressed little (24%) or no (26%) confidence in the Supreme Court. The numbers among all Americans were even worse, with 53% saying they had little-to-no confidence in the court.
The polling stands in sharp contrast to a survey done by the same outfit in September 2020, several days after liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away.
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At that point, 70% or registered voters expressed confidence in the high court, with 50% having "some" confidence and 20% expressing "a lot" of confidence. Another 30% said they had either "little" confidence (23%) or "none" (7%) in the court.
That means the number of voters expressing absolutely no confidence in the Supreme Court has nearly quadrupled in less than two years, from 7% in Sept. 2020 to 26% today. Yikes.
The court's change in fortunes came during a period in which then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell jammed through a right-wing replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, to fill Ginsburg's seat just a week before voters went to the polls to oust Donald Trump from office and, ultimately, the GOP-led Senate that installed three extreme justices during his tenure.
The ideological slide rightward of the high court appears to have sullied its reputation considerably in a short amount of time.
In Sept. 2020, 29% of voters viewed the court as "conservative" (25%) or "very conservative" (4%). Now a combined 44% call it conservative, with 22% calling it "very conservative"—a nearly six-fold increase.
At the same time, the number of Democrats and independents disapproving of the job the Supreme Court is doing has doubled since Sept. 2020, to 65% and 49%, respectively.
But the court's fall from grace hasn't merely occurred among Democrats and Democratic leaners.
"The number of Republicans who disapprove of the job the Supreme Court is doing has jumped as well, from just 17% then to 29% today," writes Yahoo News reporter Andrew Romano.