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On July 9, President Trump presents his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, in the East Room at the White House. (Leah Millis / Reuters)
Philip Bump
A national correspondent is largely focused on the numbers behind the policy
Five presidents took office after losing the popular vote. Between them, they named 12 judges who eventually sat on the Supreme Court. On Saturday, with the appointment of Brett M. Kavanaugh by President Trump on the verge of passing the Senate, the number climbs to 13.
Kavanaugh, however, has a distinct honor: he will be the first judge appointed by someone who lost the popular vote win his place on the bench with the support of senators representing less than half of the country while having his appointment opposed by a majority of the country.
Let's go through.
Clearly, Trump got nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Clinton got about 48% of the votes cast for the presidency. Trump has about 46%.
(Philip Bump / The Washington Post)
But that in itself does not tell the whole story. Nearly half of US residents over the age of 18 did not vote. Trump only got about 25% of the possible votes from all 18 years and over. Clinton has about 26%.
Again, Trump is not the only one not to have won the popular vote. President George W. Bush is the other recent president to have experienced the same fate. And, like Trump, Bush was also quite unpopular when he applied for the Supreme Court. Trump, according to A NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll, released this week, was only approved by 41% of US adults. (That's about where Bush was at the end of 2005 when he made his choice.)
(Philip Bump / The Washington Post)
But Kavanaugh, Trump's candidate, is not very popular. According to this Marist survey, just over a third of the country considers it favorably. This is certainly partly because of the allegations of sexual abuse that were made to her last month. A majority of women disapprove of it.
In addition, this same poll revealed that most Americans did not want to see it confirmed. More than half, 52%, said the Senate should not move it to the Supreme Court.
Bush's second choice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., had majority support of the public in their confirmation vote. But Alito shares this third distinction with Kavanaugh: both relied on the votes of senators representing less than half of the country to go to the Supreme Court. For Alito, the votes he received came from senators representing 49.8% of the country (allocating half the population of a state to each of its senators).
Confirmation of Kavanaugh will come with the support of Senators representing only 44.2% of the country.
(Philip Bump / The Washington Post)
(For the purposes of our count, we included Senators Steve Daines (R-Mont.) And Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who do not intend to vote for or against Kavanaugh.)
Kavanaugh will join the Supreme Court despite the opposition of senators representing more than half of the country, despite the opposition of more than half of the country to his candidacy, although it is perceived unfavorably by almost half of the country and thanks to a president disapproved by more than half the country and who lost the popular vote.
He will join three other judges who, like him, were appointed by the presidents who lost the popular vote.
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There are two answers that will surely follow from this article and that I am going to send here, for a long time, all those who are willing to offer them will have stopped reading.
The first is the common complaint that polls are imperfectly inaccurate and inaccurate, a complaint that is usually only offered for polls that the reader does not like. Anyway, it's not true.
The second is that America is a republicyou do not know, and that's how the system was designed to work. What the short answer is, yes, as a writer who talks about politics for a living, I know the Senate and the constituency. It should be noted, however, that this structure can sometimes conflict with the precept that all men are created equal.
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