By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
A new ABC News/Ipsos poll released over the weekend shows an overwhelming majority of Americans believe Joe Biden should consider all possible nominees to replace retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, rather than focus only on selecting a Black woman, as he promised on the campaign trail.
According to Ipsos, “Americans overwhelmingly believe Joe Biden should ‘consider all possible nominees’ (76%) rather than ‘consider only nominees who are Black women, as he has pledged to do’” (23%).
ABC also noted in its Sunday report, “Biden sees other troublesome disapproval numbers surrounding his handling of gun violence (69%), crime (64%), immigration (64%), the situation with Russia and Ukraine (56%) and the country’s economic recovery (56%.)”
Biden’s promise was made in 2020 on the campaign trail, and it was only Fox News that reported the poll breakdown in its lead paragraph: “More than three-quarters (76%) of Americans want President Joe Biden to consider all potential nominees to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, according to a recent ABC News-Ipsos poll.”
ABC, however, chose to report the dramatic poll disparity this way in its lead paragraph: “A new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that a plurality of Americans view the Supreme Court as motivated by partisanship, while President Joe Biden’s campaign trail vow to select a Black woman to fill a high-court vacancy without reviewing all potential candidates evokes a sharply negative reaction from voters.”
A new Rasmussen survey also revealed, “only 26% of voters think it’s a good idea to make race and gender the basis of choosing appointments to the Supreme Court. Sixty-one percent (61%) believe picking justices on the basis of race and gender is a bad idea. Another 14% are not sure.”
Then there’s Rasmussen’s Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, and it remains bad for Biden. According to the Monday numbers, only 20 percent of likely voters “strongly approve” of Biden’s job performance while 47 percent “strongly disapprove” of his performance on the job. This leaves him with a -27 Presidential Approval Index rating, which is up from his rock-bottom (so far) rating of -33 on Jan. 26. By contrast, Rasmussen reported Monday “Thirty-seven percent (37%) of voters believe the Supreme Court is doing a good or excellent job, an increase from the 33% who felt that way last September, but still below the all-time high of 43% in 2018 and 2019. Twenty-four percent (24%) now say the Supreme Court is doing a poor job, down from 30% last September.”
