Forty-five percent of voters said news coverage of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings was biased against him, according to a new American Barometer survey.
The poll, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company, also found that 20 percent of voters who responded considered the media’s coverage biased in Kavanaugh’s favor, with 35 percent saying it was neutral.
“I think that it tells you this is an incredibly divisive topic,” Democratic pollster Molly Murphy, a partner at ALG Research, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
“People don’t trust the media very much,” she added. “I think that they tend to think that there is bias.”
Kavanaugh was sworn in for his new post on Saturday after the Senate confirmed him in a 50-48 vote, capping off a highly partisan and turbulent confirmation process that was upended by allegations of sexual misconduct from three women dating back to his time in high school and college.
His first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, a week before his confirmation. She detailed her accusation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in 1982 when they were both in high school.
Kavanaugh addressed the panel after Ford, forcefully denying all of the accusations and claiming Democrats had launched a political hit job fueled by “apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election” and “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”
Republicans widely praised Kavanaugh’s testimony, but Democrats criticized his judicial temperament and said his remarks were evidence of his partisanship.
The American Barometer was conducted Oct. 6-7 among 1,000 registered voters. The sampling margin of error is 3.1 percentage points.
— Julia Manchester
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