Two-thirds of Republicans disapprove of how the court is handling its job, while two-thirds of Democrats approve.
As the eight-person Supreme Court prepares to reconvene next Monday for its fall term, Americans’ views of the court remain highly partisan. Slightly more than one in four Republicans (26%) approve of the how the court is handling its job, compared with 42% of independents and 67% of Democrats.
These results are from Gallup’s Sept. 7-11 Governance poll. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election, it could result in a left-leaning justice filling the vacant seat left by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, giving the liberal wing majority control of the court.
The current 41-percentage-point gap between Democrats and Republicans is not as large as the gap Gallup found in July 2015 — after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage and rejected a challenge to the Affordable Care Act — when 76% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans approved. A year before that, in a July 2014 survey, there was no party difference in approval of the court. From 2000 to 2014, partisans’ views varied, influenced partly by the party of the president, but also by the direction of some of the court’s decisions.
Via Gallup