Will flipflop on Supreme Court matter to voters?
Robert Van Houweling can’t remember seeing political flipflopping like this before. And the UC Berkeley political science professor has studied doublespeak for a decade.
“At least not this selfevident,” Van Houweling said of the revisionist history that Republican senators have spun since Friday to justify their reasoning for when to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
Four years ago, Republican senators said one thing about confirming a new justice in the last year of a president’s term and today — when it’s
their party’s president in the White House — most of them are saying something else. Democrats have done their share of pirouetting from 2016, too.
But do voters care that senators are contradicting positions they once held? Or do they just expect that all politicians lie all the time and will ignore it after President Trump nominates Ginsburg’s replacement Saturday?
The answer is complicated, said Stanford Professor Jon Krosnick, who has been researching the impact of candidates flipping their positions on policy issues.
“Voters can care,” said Krosnick, a professor of communication, political science and psychology. “But the word ‘hypocritical’ has five syllables in it. It’s not something that people say in bars over beers.”
Republican senators won’t pay a price for their pretzel logic, he said, “unless Democrats spend a lot of money making sure voters know about it” in simple, straightforward terms.
The money has been rolling in to Democrats since Ginsburg’s death — more than $160 million has come into the online fundraising site ActBlue alone — and commercials pounding home this message are starting to appear, featuring prominent Republicans including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham taking one line in past years and another now.
But even armed with video evidence, Krosnick said, it will be hard to get voters to care passionately about these contradictions because on one level, they’re about a procedural issue — when to schedule a Supreme Court vote. Voters care more about policy flipflops, he said, such as when politicians first endorse, say, an expansion of Medicare and then back away.
Let’s back up a minute to review how we got here.
Four years ago, thenPresident Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But McConnell refused to let senators vote on Garland. His reasoning then: It was too close — 237 days — to the election.
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice,” the Kentucky Republican said in 2016. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
McConnell was betting the new president would be a Republican, and he won when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Trump went on to put Neil Gorsuch in Scalia’s seat.
But McConnell’s reasoning changed when Ginsburg died 46 days before this year’s election. This time, he isn’t talking about the American people having a voice in choosing the next justice.
“Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an oppositeparty president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year,” McConnell said in justifying his switch.
This is the line GOP senators have adopted to protect themselves against accusations of flipflopping: It’s a different situation because the White House and Senate are controlled by the same party.
Democrats see it as a rationalization for a naked power play, but that’s not necessarily what voters will conclude, said Christian Grose, a University of Southern California political scientist who has published research on how senators take positions. For people who aren’t hardcore partisans, he said, any explanation will do.
“Senators can take contrary positions to what some voters want, but if they are able to explain that change of position clearly, then voters will not punish them,” Grose said. “Voters who agree with their position will support them and voters who disagree won’t like their position, but are more amenable to the flipflop if a clear and good explanation is provided.”
The first polls suggest that voters are divided on the court issue. Half of the registered voters surveyed in a Poltico/ Morning Consult poll released Monday said the November election winner should pick Ginsburg’s replacement, while 37% said Trump should “since he is the current president.”
Democrats haven’t been flipfree in this story. Four years ago, for example, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York led his party in urging the Senate to vote on the Garland nomination, arguing that “it is the Senate’s duty to hold hearings and vote on the nominee based on the merits.”
But Schumer has done a 180 this time, even though McConnell has said almost exactly that same thing — that the Senate is obligated to vote on the nominee based on merits. Schumer justified his new stance by basing it on Ginsburg’s reported last wish that her replacement be named by the next president.
There’s a danger that as partisans retreat to their respective corners with their respective justifications, independent and undecided voters will just shake their heads.
“It will continue to make them feel that politicians are disgusting,” said Laura Stoker, a professor emerita of political science at UC Berkeley who has done extensive research on political cynicism. “This kind of thing does indeed fuel cynicism, and rightly so. People feel that this is what politicians do.
“But will enough feel this way to affect the election? No,” Stoker said. “It will only move a few people at the margins.”
All this flipflopping isn’t surprising from a psychological perspective, said Norbert Schwarz of the USC Dornsife Mind and Society Center, who studies how people make decisions. People — not just politicians — behave like this all the time through a process called motivated reasoning, he said.
McConnell offered a new reasoning for changing positions, saying the circumstances were different from 2016. Schwarz said people will agree with that if they like the result — a conservative justice on the court — and disagree if they don’t.
“It’s like how you feel when a couple you know gets a divorce,” Schwarz said. “You may side with one person because you like them better and think the other is a monster.”
But this isn’t a bad marriage, it’s the nation’s future. When the dust settles, Schwarz said, “the big loser is going to be trust in the Supreme Court. Even more people will see it as a place that’s all about politics.”