Democrats Still Despise the Supreme Court. But Republican Voters Are Getting Skeptical, Too
Trump called the tariffs ruling “deeply disappointing.” New polling data suggests that some of his supporters were listening, and adjusted their views accordingly.
For employees at polling organizations, getting assigned to the Supreme Court approval rating beat more or less guarantees that you are going to talk to people who are very, very angry about the Supreme Court. The latest results, courtesy of NBC News, are as bad as things have been since NBC News began polling the question a quarter-century ago: Just 22 percent of registered voters now say they have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the Court.
To put this in perspective, after the Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, that overall confidence figure sank to a then-all-time low of 27 percent. What this means is that in the four years since it issued a wildly unpopular decision that deprived hundreds of millions of people of their legal right to bodily autonomy, the Court has since managed to make itself even more loathsome.
NBC News’s story about the results includes a helpful line graph tracking confidence in the Court since the justices decided Bush v. Gore in 2000. Just eyeballing it, the blue “great deal/quite a bit of confidence” looks a lot like Trump’s approval rating; the green “very little/no confidence” line, by contrast, looks a lot like the price of a barrel of crude these days.
More intriguing, I think, are the trends peeking through in the cross-tabs. For several years, the Court’s overall approval rating has been propped up by Republicans who fervently supported the six-justice conservative supermajority’s policy agenda. The Court’s approval rating among Democrats, meanwhile, has either been in single digits or close to it. For example, NBC News last polled this question shortly after the justices created a bespoke doctrine of presidential immunity in Trump v. United States. As you might guess, at the time, 53 percent of Republicans expressed their confidence in the Court, compared to 4 percent of Democrats.
The latest results are a little different. Democrats are as skeptical as ever, but Republicans, too, have their doubts: Just 35 percent now say they are confident in the Court—the lowest figure since 2015, when the justices infuriated Republicans everywhere by extending constitutional protections to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Recent headlines probably play a role here, too: The 2026 poll took place a week after the Court struck down Trump’s tariffs regime in Learning Resources v. Trump, which prompted the president to lash out at the conservatives who joined the majority for “not having the courage to do what’s right.” It appears that at least some of his supporters were listening, and adjusted their views accordingly.
For Democratic politicians and candidates, the bottom-line takeaway is the same as the bottom-line takeaway from polls that show growing support for meaningful Supreme Court reform, which I covered last month: People do not like the Supreme Court, and running against it is basically a free square on the campaign trail bingo card. But these poll results introduce a fun new wrinkle: Among Republican voters, support for the Court—even the most conservative Court in a century—is softer than recent history and conventional wisdom might suggest.
I am not saying that Democratic candidates will be able to effortlessly persuade broad swaths of the Republican electorate to vote for Democrats, since disapproval of the Court for empowering Trump’s lawlessness is notably different from disapproval of the Court for not empowering Trump’s lawlessness enough. But at the very least, these numbers indicate that Democrats who have remained wary of “politicizing” the Court do not need to be skittish anymore. Everyone from the President of the United States on down understands the reality that the Supreme Court is “political.” Democrats have the most to gain by acknowledging it.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
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Our current SCOTUS justices deserve to be despised--all of them. Don't take my word for that, take theirs. They're actually lying to us about our Constitution in ways that are clearly belied by the plain text of our Constitution.
Take the anonymous (per curiam) so-called opinion in Trump v. Anderson. In a case specifically about how federal officials come to be elected, unidentified SCOTUS justices authored or joined in (and the others failed to object to) two knowing falsehoods, i.e., that “federal officers owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not of a portion, of the people,” and “powers over their election and qualifications must be specifically ‘delegated to, rather than reserved by, the States.’ ”
It's impossible to support the first falsehood with the text of our Constitution. No federal employee whatsoever is chosen by "the united voice of the whole, not of a portion, of the people.” Clearly, every federal employee over whom any of "the people" have any say in choosing is chosen by only a portion of people.
The second falsehood, above, was a direct and deliberate misrepresentation (a blatant reversal of key terms) of the text of the Tenth Amendment. Amendment X expressly emphasized that all "powers" that the People "delegated" to anyone "by the Constitution" were "delegated to the United States." It also expressly emphasized that all "powers" that the People "reserved" to anyone were "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
That tactic (direct and deliberate misrepresentation and even a blatant reversal of key terms of the text of a vital amendment) was not new to Trump v. Anderson. Six SCOTUS justices used the same trick in Dobbs (and the dissenting justices again failed to object).
In Dobbs the majority (twice) knowingly misrepresented that the Ninth Amendment was a mere "reservation of rights to the people." That clearly is not the purpose (or the plain text) of that amendment. Article I, Sections 9 and 10 and Amendments I through VIII, XIII through XV, XIX, XXIV and XXVI clearly reserve rights to the people.
The Ninth Amendment clearly does not merely reserve any rights. The Ninth Amendment does not even use the word "reserve." It uses a word with a profoundly different meaning, i.e., rights "retained by the people." The Dobbs majority stole the word "reservation" from the Tenth Amendment, which expressly emphasized that the People had "reserved" some "powers" (not rights) to "the people."
After the Dobbs majority lied about the Ninth Amendment, they leveraged their lie to justify violating the plain text and plain meaning of the Ninth Amendment. They contended that "[t]he Constitution makes no express reference to a right to [do something specific], and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text." Six SCOTUS justices deliberately disparaged a right and they expressly did so based on a factor that they all knew was forbidden, i.e., their representation that "[t]he Constitution makes no express reference to a right" to do something.
The justices responsible for Dobbs (and those who failed to object to their mutilation and violation of the Ninth Amendment) knew that the Ninth Amendment expressly prohibited judges from doing what the Dobbs majority did, i.e., exploiting "[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights" to pretend to justify how they "construed" our Constitution "to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The day before SCOTUS issued the Dobbs decision, the same six SCOTUS justices were in the majority in another decision (Bruen) which conclusively proved the existence of the kind of rights that were (1) retained by the people (as alluded to by the Ninth Amendment) and (2) highly relevant to the right to terminate human life.
In Bruen, SCOTUS justices proved that the People irrefutably retained the rights to terminate the lives of other actual persons (even other citizens) in self-defense, self-preservation and defense or preservation of others. In Bruen, they proved that all women had the right to take the life of another actual person (and even another citizen) for any such purpose. Yet, in Dobbs, the same six justices pretended to be blind to the right of any women to take life (not even of another actual person) even for self-preservation.
At least six SCOTUS justices pretended that state legislators somehow have the power that the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly denied them: "No State" has any power to "make or enforce any [purported] law" that would "abridge [any] privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" or "deprive any person" (male or female) of any "liberty" before affording such person all "process of law" that is "due" or "deny to any person" (male or female) "the equal protection of the laws."
The Fourth Amendment (and the First, Second and Third) already expressly emphasized "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" from the intrusions of federal officials.
In Trump v. Anderson, the SCOTUS justices responsible for Dobbs and Bruen emphasized that "the Fourteenth Amendment" explicitly “expand[ed] federal power at the expense of state autonomy” and it “fundamentally altered the balance of state and federal power struck by the Constitution.” Obviously, "the substantive provisions of the Amendment" were designed impose "significant limitations on state authority.”
The so-called justices responsible for the foregoing deserve to be despised for doing what they have done and are doing to the paramount law of the land, which "We the People of the United States" in June 1788 did "establish" as our "Constitution" to "establish Justice" and to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves."