WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - A clear majority of US voters believe the winner of the presidential election should fill the Supreme Court seat left open by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to a national poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, a sign of the political peril President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans are courting by attempting to rush through an appointment before the end of the campaign.
In a survey of likely voters taken in the week leading up to Trump's nomination on Saturday of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the high court, 56 per cent said they preferred to have the election act as a sort of referendum on the vacancy.
Only 41 per cent said they wanted Trump to choose a justice before November.
More striking, the voters Trump and endangered Senate Republicans must reclaim to close the gap in the polls are even more opposed to a hasty pick: 62 per cent of women, 63 per cent of independents and 60 per cent of college-educated white voters said they wanted the winner of the campaign to fill the seat.
The warning signs for Republicans are also stark on the issue of abortion, on which Barrett, a fiercely conservative jurist, could offer a pivotal vote should she be confirmed: 60 per cent of those surveyed believe abortion should be legal all or some of the time.
The poll suggests that Trump would reap little political benefit from a clash over abortion rights: 56 per cent said they would be less likely to vote for Trump if his justice would help overturn Roe vs Wade, while just 24 per cent said they would be more inclined to vote for him.
Beyond the coming battle over the court, the survey indicates that Trump remains an unpopular president who has not established a clear upper hand over Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, on any of the most important issues of the campaign.
Voters are rejecting him by wide margins on his management of the coronavirus pandemic, and they express no particular confidence in his handling of public order. While he receives comparatively strong marks on the economy, a majority of voters also say he is at least partly to blame for the economic downturn.
Perhaps the most comforting news in the poll for Republicans is that at least some Americans appear to have fluid or contradictory opinions on the confirmation process.
While most voters would prefer that the next president appoint Ginsburg's successor, the country was effectively split on whether the Senate should act on Trump's nomination: 47 per cent of voters said it should, 48 per cent said it should not, and 5 per cent were undecided. Still, women and independents were firmly against the Senate seating Trump's appointee.
The poll had a margin of sampling error of 3.5 percentage points.
Ginsburg's death has jolted Washington just weeks before the election, heralding the possibility of an enduring conservative majority on the Supreme Court and marking the latest extraordinary event in perhaps the most unusual election year in modern history.
Yet if the pandemic, economic collapse and increasingly tense racial justice protests have upended life for many Americans, they have done little to reshape a presidential campaign that polls show has been remarkably stable.
Biden is leading Trump, 49 per cent to 41 per cent, the Times survey shows, propelled by his wide advantage among women and Black and Latino voters and by his gains among constituencies that strongly favoured the president in 2016, including men and older voters. Biden and Trump are tied among men, with each garnering 45 per cent.
The former vice-president appears notably stronger among college-educated white voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Biden is winning 60 per cent of white women with college degrees, compared with 34 per cent for Trump, and he is beating the president among men with college degrees, 50 per cent to 45 per cent.
Four years ago, according to exit polls, Clinton won college-educated white women by only 7 percentage points and lost college-educated white men to Trump by 14 points.
With ballots having already been sent out in a number of states and with the first presidential debate scheduled for Tuesday, Trump has a narrowing window for a comeback.
In an important difference from the 2016 campaign, he would need to draw much closer to 50 per cent to defeat Biden because there is substantially less interest in third-party candidates this year.
The Libertarian and Green Party nominees are garnering only 3 per cent combined; that figure is closer to more typical elections than to the one four years ago, when minor-party candidates polled far higher in the period approaching the election and combined to get as much as 6% of the vote in some key states.
With the country so polarised, public opinion on a variety of issues is increasingly linked to presidential preference. The question of which candidate would do a better job picking a Supreme Court justice, for example, effectively matches the White House race: 50 per cent of voters trust Biden on the high court, 43 per cent trust Trump, and 7 per cent are undecided, equaling the percentage of undecided voters in the presidential race.
Voter sentiments are less partisan, though, on the issue of abortion. Although Trump's vow to quickly fill Ginsburg's seat has enraged the left, it's not just liberal intensity that poses a risk to Republicans if the court clash centers on the future of Roe.
The poll shows that 71 per cent of independents said abortion should be legal all or most of the time, and even 31 per cent of Republicans said the same. Only 33 per cent of the country said the procedure should be illegal all or most of the time.
Crucial constituencies said they would be less likely to vote for Trump if his nominee would overturn Roe. That included 65 per cent of independents and 61 per cent of college-educated white voters.
