Tired of All The Winning

There are many reasons that the overwhelming majority of Senate Republicans didn’t want the charges against Kavanaugh investigated. Perhaps the most important is that they just don’t care if he’s guilty. They also probably understood that it would be bad politically for the party, and if so they’re right:

Opposition among Americans to Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, has increased in the wake of his testimony last week before a U.S. Senate committee in which he defiantly denied sexual misconduct allegations, Reuters/Ipsos polling data showed on Wednesday.

In the latest seven-day average in a survey of U.S. adults, 41 percent of respondents opposed Kavanaugh, 33 percent supported the conservative federal appeals court judge and 26 percent said they did not know.

I’ve seen this article speculating that ramming Kavanaugh through will help Republicans retain the Senate cited a fair amount. I would ask you to read carefully and note the ratio of “polling data” to “bare assertions of Republican strategists.” You never know, but generally doing really unpopular things is not going to make you popular. Perhaps winning the fight will mobilize some Republicans, but that’s not the end of the story:

It’s possible. But here’s what else we know: The key variable in the 2018 election isn’t how motivated Republican voters are. It’s how motivated Democratic-leaning voters are, especially women. It’s hard to imagine that the Kavanaugh affair — with its dramatic standoff between a shouting, red-faced man visibly enraged at seeing his ascension and privilege hit a rough patch, and a woman quietly but insistently sticking up for herself in the face of a national outpouring of rage and abuse — isn’t going to help in this regard.

A new Quinnipiac poll tells this story quite well. It finds that American voters lean against confirming Kavanaugh and lean toward believing Ford over him. But there’s more. We’ve obtained additional numbers from Quinnipiac, and they show college-educated white women in opposition to Kavanaugh by truly overwhelming margins.

This is notable, because despite the fact that college-educated whites sometimes lean Republican, those female voters are widely thought to be important to the Democrats’ chances of capturing the House and/or the Senate this fall, because they are driving the backlash against President Trump.

The Quinnpiac poll finds that voters oppose confirming Kavanaugh by 48-42. But women oppose Kavanaugh by 55-37, and college educated white women oppose him by 58-34.

Meanwhile, overall voters believe Ford over Kavanaugh by 48 to 41. But women believe her over him by 55 to 35, and college-educated white women believe her by 61 to 31.

The new polling also suggests that Trump’s handling of the Kavanaugh story may be helping to deepen the gender divide roiling our politics. It finds that voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the nomination by 49 to 42. But women disapprove of it by 54 to 36, and college-educated white women are once again driving this, disapproving by 58 to 35.

Unless Republicans can find some way to disenfranchise educated white women, it’s very hard to see a party-line confirmation of Kavanaugh helping them politically.