US voters believe winner of election should fill court vacancy, shows poll

Biden retains a clear lead over Trump, 49 to 41% in presidential race, says poll

A clear majority of voters believes the winner of the US presidential election should fill the Supreme Court seat left open by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to a national poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, a sign of the political peril President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans are courting by attempting to rush through an appointment before the end of the campaign.

In a survey of likely voters taken in the week leading up to Trump’s nomination on Saturday of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the high court, 56 per cent said they preferred to have the election act as a sort of referendum on the vacancy. Only 41 per cent said they wanted Trump to choose a justice before November. More striking, the voters Trump and endangered Senate Republicans must reclaim to close the gap in the polls are even more opposed to a hasty pick: 62 per cent of women, 63 per cent of independents and 60 per cent of college-educated white voters said they wanted the winner of the campaign to fill the seat. 

The warning signs for Republicans are also stark on the issue of abortion, on which Judge Barrett, a fiercely conservative jurist, could offer a pivotal vote should she be confirmed: 60 per cent of those surveyed believe abortion should be legal all or some of the time. The poll suggests that Trump would reap little political benefit from a clash over abortion rights: 56 percent said they would be less likely to vote for  Trump if his justice would help overturn Roe v. Wade, while just 24 per cent said they would be more inclined to vote for him.

Beyond the coming battle over the court, the survey indicates that Trump remains an unpopular president.

who has not established a clear upper hand over Joseph R Biden Jr, the Democratic nominee, on any of the most important issues of the campaign. Voters are rejecting him by wide margins on his management of the coronavirus pandemic, and they express no particular confidence in his handling of public order. 

While he receives comparatively strong marks on the economy, a majority of voters also say he is at least partly to blame for the economic downturn.

Perhaps the most comforting news in the poll for Republicans is that at least some Americans appear to have fluid or contradictory opinions on the nomination process. While most voters would prefer that the next president appoint Justice Ginsburg’s successor, the country was effectively split on whether the Senate should act on Mr. Trump’s nomination: 47 percent of voters said it should, 48 percent said it should not, and 5 percent were undecided. Still, women and independents were firmly against the Senate’s seating Mr. Trump’s appointee.

The poll had a margin of sampling error of 3.5 percentage points.

Yet if the pandemic, economic collapse and increasingly tense racial justice protests have upended life for many Americans, they have done little to reshape a presidential campaign that polls show has been remarkably stable.

Mr. Biden is leading Mr. Trump, 49 percent to 41 percent, the Times survey shows, propelled by his wide advantage among women and Black and Latino voters and by his gains among constituencies that strongly favored the president in 2016, including men and older voters. Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are tied among men, with each garnering 45 percent.

Justice Ginsburg’s death has jolted Washington just weeks before the election, heralding the possibility of an enduring conservative majority on the Supreme Court and marking the latest extraordinary event in perhaps the most unusual election year in modern history.