Americans are divided on whether or not senators should vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, with 38% who say yes and 39% who say no, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS and released on Tuesday.
Related: Full poll results
More Americans disapprove (45%) of the way Republicans and Democrats in the Senate handled the hearings than the 34% who approved of the way the hearings were handled.
But 68% of Republicans in the poll approve of how their own party performed. A slightly smaller percentage of Democrats (59%) approve of how their party handled the Kavanaugh’s hearings.
Democrats who identify as liberal were more likely to approve of how Senate Democrats are handling Kavanaugh’s hearings, with two-thirds who say so compared to moderate or conservative Democrats, only half of whom approve of their party’s actions regarding the hearings. That could be good news for the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee with 2020 ambitions. Senators like New Jersey’s Cory booker and California’s Kamala Harris used the platform of the hearings to push Kavanaugh on a number of issues.
That exposure could be helpful if they are to appeal to the liberal side of the party and cut through what is expected to be a crowded Democratic field in 2020.
Independents aren’t very happy with either party, with 28% who say they approve of how both the Democrats and the Republicans are handling the situation.
Regarding Kavanaugh himself, Americans are still split on whether his views are mainstream or too extreme, with 39% who say he’s mainstream and 37% who think he’s too extreme on important issues. A quarter still don’t know enough to say. Women are less likely to view Kavanaugh’s views as mainstream, with only 34% who say so — 10 percentage points less than men.
The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS Sept. 6 through 9 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults reached on landlines or cellphones by a live interviewer. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.
