A plurality of Americans says that President Biden should deliver on his campaign pledge to nominate the country’s first African American female justice to the Supreme Court, according to a new poll.
The survey, conducted by the left-leaning firm Public Policy Polling on behalf of the progressive court reform group Demand Justice, found that 48 percent of respondents said Biden should keep this promise, compared to 31 percent who said he should not.
Biden reaffirmed his campaign vow last week at a White House event to announce the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the court’s three liberal members, who will depart the court this summer after nearly three decades on the bench.
“I’ve made no decision except one: The person I will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity,” Biden said. “And that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court. It’s long overdue in my view.”
Among the likely candidates to replace Breyer are Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; Leondra Kruger, 45, who has served on the California Supreme Court since 2015; and J. Michelle Childs, 55, a federal district court judge in South Carolina whom Biden recently nominated to the D.C. Circuit Court.
A separate poll published this weekend also addressed Biden’s pledge, though it phrased the survey question differently. That poll, conducted by ABC-Ipsos, found that 76 percent of those surveyed want the president to consider “all possible nominees,” while just 23 percent want him to only consider Black women for the nomination.
The seating of Biden’s nominee will not fundamentally shift the balance of the 6-3 conservative majority court. But replacing Breyer with a justice who is ideologically to his left could reshape the three-member liberal minority.
The Public Policy Polling survey was based on responses from 662 national registered voters contacted Jan. 28-29 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.