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The average net approval or the assessment of the favorability of these candidates was 20 percentage points.
Kavanaugh's net favor rating is just above zero right now. No such unpopular candidate as Kavanaugh has been confirmed in modern times. Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination after being chosen by President George W. Bush, while Bork was rejected after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan.
The low popularity of Kavanaugh certainly limits his potential to obtain Democratic votes. Once we control factors such as the qualifications of a candidate and his ideological distance from each senator, the popularity of a candidate has affected the number of votes received for confirmation. One of President George H.W. Bush's choices, Clarence Thomas, for example, would probably not have been confirmed without his strong ratings of popularity.
When you combine the composition of the Senate and Kavanaugh's judicial profile, his current popularity rating is probably not low enough for Republicans to vote against him. He can even take a Democratic vote.
Now, the good news for Democrats is that candidates tend to see their popularity decrease after a confirmation hearing.
Bork, for example, initially had a one-point favorability rating in a Times Mirror poll. That's more than 10 points higher than when his popularity rating was found in a Los Angeles Times poll before the Senate voted on it.
When I already wrote about Kavanaugh, I noticed that a Bork type popularity could be low enough for Kavanaugh to be rejected. More precisely, this would lead him on average to obtain 49 votes against 50 against.
This, however, was back when Senator John McCain was not healthy enough to be in Washington to vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation. In other words, at the time when Republicans had only 50 Senators for Democrats 49.
I guess it's possible that Kavanaugh becomes even more unpopular than Bork. In this highly partisan environment in which potential judges are much less likely to reveal their positions on issues of judicial importance than they were at the time Bork was being studied, it seems unlikely that Kavanaugh's public figures would change as much.
At the end of the day, with 51 Republican senators, he is very likely to find himself before the Supreme Court.
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