Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
When he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee as it considered his nomination for chief justice in 2005, John Roberts likened the Court’s role to that of an umpire, simply calling balls and strikes as the justices saw them.
Today, 19 years after Roberts began presiding over the Supreme Court, Americans overwhelmingly believe that the Court would rule a pitch that sailed over the backstop was a strike if that somehow enabled Republicans to win a crucial election.
Last Thursday, the Pew Research Center released a survey of more than 4,000 registered voters gauging their levels of confidence in the fairness and accuracy of the electoral process in the upcoming presidential election. It found that 73 percent of all voters (90 percent of Harris supporters and 57 percent of Trump supporters) were confident that “the elections will be run well.” Breaking that down to particulars, 97 percent of Harris supporters and 84 percent of Trump supporters thought their local poll workers would do a good job; 62 percent of the Harrisites and 36 percent of the Trumpies were very confident about this. When asked the same question about the “officials who run elections in your state,” 91 percent of the Harrisites and 72 percent of the Trumpies affirmed that they thought those officials would do a good job, too.
Keep in mind that the state election officials in whom these voters expressed confidence are elected officials, the vast majority of them elected in partisan elections, and all of them, including those elected in nonpartisan elections, with clear partisan affiliations.
But the weakest link in the chain of credibility on questions of electoral outcome was the unelected, presumably nonpartisan Supreme Court. Pew asked voters how much confidence they had that the Supreme Court would be “politically neutral in its decision if there are legal challenges to the 2024 presidential election.” Overall, 52 percent said they were not too confident or not at all confident, while 48 percent put themselves down as somewhat, very, or extremely confident.
Just 20 percent of all voters said they were very or extremely confident in the balls-and-strikes branch of our government. Only 34 percent of Trump supporters answered that way, and just 6 percent of Harris supporters.
In other words, Americans view the Supreme Court as the most partisan body within our government when it comes to the all-important duty of ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our most important elections.
Just 20 percent of all voters said they were very or extremely confident in the balls-and-strikes branch of our government.
Giving credit where credit is due, this is a distinction that the Republicans appointed to the Court by Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump have worked hard to earn. The decision in Bush v. Gore, in which the Court stopped the counting of ballots in Florida at a time when George W. Bush led Al Gore by fewer than 600 votes, was the deafening opening salvo in this war. Over the next two decades, other election-skewing decisions supported only by the Republicans were to follow. One such decision was Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Republicans signed on to a Roberts opinion striking down the key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which had allowed for federal oversight of election laws and processes in states and counties with histories of racial discrimination. Over the past year, the Court delayed the pending trial of Donald Trump for his role in seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election by suborning perjury and inciting a mob to violently stop Congress’s pro forma certification of the electoral votes, so that the trial wouldn’t proceed until after the election. And in June, passing up another opportunity to let that trial proceed, the Republican justices decreed that the president could not be held legally liable for any actions—effectively, any crimes—committed when acting in his or her official capacity, a Get Out of Jail Free If You’re President card.
All the above may have figured somehow in the public’s assessment that the Court is our most partisan electoral actor. So, too, I suspect, did the public’s awareness that Republican Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is a MAGA die-hard who led some of the campaigns to overturn the 2020 electoral outcome, and that Republican Justice Samuel Alito’s wife flew a MAGA flag outside the Alito home to protest the injustice of Americans’ having elected Joe Biden rather than Trump, and the self-evident (though completely without a scintilla of evidence to back it up) skullduggery that must have produced that unjust outcome.
So: At a time when Democrats’ trust in Republican elected officials is at an all-time low, and when Republicans’ trust in Democratic elected officials is lower than that, including, in both instances, when it comes to running and tallying elections fairly, with no partisan bias, the least trusted entity in the United States in these matters turns out to be the Supreme Court. It’s no secret that the Court’s standing in public opinion has fallen to levels associated with particularly troublesome strains of bacteria, but this new Pew survey provides the most striking example of the Court’s loss, not just of popularity, but of legitimacy.
