Trust in the Supreme Court ticked upward despite an onslaught of attacks against the institution since former President Donald Trump cemented a 6-3 Republican-appointed majority on the bench four years ago, a poll released on Thursday found.
The poll from Marquette Law School found 45% of adults approve of the justices’ work, while 55% disapprove, with the school noting the approval “edges upward” from near-historic lows. The approval rating was up two points from the same poll in July, while a separate survey from Gallup found a slightly higher 48% of the public trusts the judicial branch a “great deal/fair amount.”
The polls come as Democrats have attempted to make the Supreme Court a key issue for voters heading to the polls next month, demanding sweeping reforms such as a binding code of ethics and recusal rules for the justices, along with controversial pushes for term limits. Democrats have stoked animosity toward the high court since the 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Carrie Severino, president of JCN and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, posted to X that the data indicated another “left-wing narrative about the Supreme Court falls apart.”
The same poll from Gallup also found that news media was among the least trusted groups among 10 civil and political institutions involved in the Democratic process, while the judicial branch scored as the fourth most trusted institution. The federal government and legislative branch were rated the eighth and ninth most distrusted of the groups, respectively, from Gallup’s survey.
“This comes after the media has spent the last few years pushing a nonstop false narrative that the Supreme Court lacks public confidence and legitimacy,” Severino said. “It turns out the media needs to take a look in the mirror.”
After the high court sent the issue of placing gestational limits on abortion back to the states with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, approval in the Supreme Court sunk to historic lows, according to Marquette’s databank, when just 38% approved of the justices between July and December of 2022.
But that also coincided with an unprecedented leak in May of that year, when Politico published a leaked draft opinion of the Dobbs decision weeks before the justices were slated to decide the case. The aftermath of the leak spiraled into weeks of protests outside the high court building and months of demonstrations outside of some of the justices’ homes, in addition to an assassination attempt on Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh outside his Maryland home.
While the Marquette poll found a 90% “large majority” of the 1,005 respondents favored “enforcing a strict ethics code” on the Supreme Court justices, the public was more divided on rating the honesty and ethical standards of the justices today, with 27% saying that the justices have “very high or high standards,” 38% saying their standards are average, and 35% saying ethical standards “are low or very low.”
As the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris grows tighter with each passing day, per recent polls, Democrats say the potential for one of them to select an additional Supreme Court justice in the next four years remains a top issue.
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But Republican voters say the economy and immigration rank among their highest priorities, and a majority of respondents say economic stability is their number one issue, according to an Oct. 9 survey from Gallup.
Eighty-three percent of respondents told Marquette that the choice of the next Supreme Court justice is “very or somewhat important” to them, with similar percentages of Republicans and Democrats aligning on the importance of the issue.