A majority of Americans disapprove of the job the court is doing, a Washington Post-Ipsos survey finds. Still, it fares better than the president or Congress.
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More than half of Americans disapprove of how the Supreme Court is doing its job, while 46 percent believe that the court is ruling on President Donald Trump’s policies based on ideology rather than the law, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.
The approval numbers, gathered this month, are among the court’s lowest in recent memory and reflect an ongoing trend of Americans viewing the court’s decisions as partisan. In the term that ended in June, the high court gave the Trump administration critical wins by expanding presidential power and allowing officials to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants living legally in the United States.
But the court checked Trump on other major priorities, for example upholding birthright citizenship and blocking the sweeping tariffs Trump placed on goods from around the world. The court also said the president could not, for now at least, fire a Democratic member of the Federal Reserve Board.
According to the new poll, 55 percent of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court’s performance while 41 percent approve. That hovers around historic lows, although it does not reach the dissatisfaction levels of 2022, when Gallup reported that 58 percent of Americans disapproved of the court’s performance while 40 percent approved. (That survey came a few months after the court overturned Roe v. Wade, its landmark decision finding a constitutional right to abortion.)
The new poll found that two-thirds of Republicans approve of the court while three-quarters of Democrats disapprove. Nearly 6 in 10 independents also disapprove.
Even with relatively low ratings, the court fares better than the other branches of government. President Donald Trump’s approval rating is mired in the 30s, according to the poll. A Gallup poll in April showed Congress’s approval rating at 10 percent.
Many Americans also view the court as political. Forty-six percent of Americans think the justices rule on Trump administration policies based on their political views, while 25 percent see the court as ruling based on the law, according to the new poll. Nearly 3 in 10 have no opinion on the question.
Among those who suspect that justices’ political views are decisive, 66 percent said the justices mainly favored Trump while 17 percent believed they mainly opposed Trump. Seventeen percent said they neither favored nor opposed the president.
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The findings are largely in line with other polls that have found declining approval ratings and a belief that the court acts based on political views. In 2024, after the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to grant presidents broad immunity for official acts, more than 8 in 10 voters thought partisanship played some role in the justices’ decisions, according to a Fox News poll. That view was largely shared among Democrats and Republicans.
In 2025, 47 percent of Americans viewed the Supreme Court as conservative, while 44 percent saw it as “middle of the road,” according to a Pew Research Center study.
The court’s members have long resisted the notion that justices decide cases based on their political views. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said during his 2005 confirmation hearing that it was his job to “call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett said in 2021 that “this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”
But the high court’s interventions this year in a number of election-related disputes, in ways that benefited Republicans, have angered Democrats.
Political analysts on both sides say the court’s weakening of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is likely to deliver extra House seats to the GOP in the midterm elections. The court in June also sided with congressional Republicans who asked the justices to loosen limits on campaign spending by political parties. Although the ruling theoretically applies equally to both parties, it was brought by Republican lawmakers and could give the GOP a boost in the near term.
Read detailed results of the Washington Post-Ipsos poll. The poll was conducted online July 8-13 among 2,648 U.S. adults nationwide reached through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an ongoing panel of U.S. households recruited by mail using random sampling methods. Overall results have a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points. The sample was weighted to match population demographics, 2024 turnout/vote choice and political partisanship.
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