About 40 percent of U.S. adults say they approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
In the Marquette Law School poll, conducted Feb. 5-15, approval and disapproval ratings for the nation's highest court remained largely unchanged from the previous poll, conducted in November. In February, 40 percent approved and 60 percent disapproved, while in November 41 percent approved and 59 percent disapproved.
Americans' views of the Supreme Court have undergone a dramatic reversal since 2020, however. In a September 2020 poll, overall approval for the court was at 66 percent among U.S. adults, with 33 percent disapproving.
Approval dipped to its low point in July 2022 — the first survey conducted after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion — when only 38 percent of U.S. adults said they approved of the Supreme Court, and 61 percent said they disapproved. At various points since then, overall approval for the court has ticked up slightly, but never above 47 percent, which it reached in January 2023.
The party and ideological trend lines since 2020 are even more stark. In September 2020, most Americans across different party identifications said they approved of the way the Supreme Court was handling its job: 78 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Independents said they approved..
In the most recent poll, however, each group saw a decline in its approval of the high court. Only Republicans still had a majority that approved, at 57 percent, though that figure was also down 21 points from September 2020.
Democratic approval for the Supreme Court, meanwhile, was less than half of what it was in September 2020 — dropping 33 points to 27 percent approval in the most recent poll. Independents, too, have seen approval plummet, with only 28 percent approving of the high court in the February survey, down 22 points from September 2020.
The survey comes as the Supreme Court is expected to take some high-profile cases in the coming weeks, in particular related to the 2024 presidential election and former President Trump’s legal issues. Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court justices — three out of nine of whom he appointed — on a number of occasions, as his legal team works to delay proceedings in his criminal trials until after the November election.
The Marquette survey interviewed 1,003 adults nationwide and had a margin of error of +/-4.3 percentage points.
