Opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination rises each day since hearings

Opposition to Brett Kavanaugh has risen each day since his explosive Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last week, in which the judge was publicly accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos survey showed 41 per cent of respondents saying they opposed Mr Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, while just 33 per cent of respondents said they supported him. Meanwhile, 26 per cent said they did not know whether to support Donald Trump’s pick to join the nation’s highest court.

Opposition to Mr Kavanaugh grew four per cent after Thursday’s hearings, in which Dr Ford detailed a sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh and he denied it, portraying himself as the victim of a "political hit."

Opposition grew every day after the hearing in the poll, conducted between 25 September 1 October.

The increase in opposition to Mr Kavanaugh appeared to be driven by those who previously did not have an opinion. The per cent of respondents with no opinion on Mr Kavanaugh decreased by about 7 per cent, compared to a week before the hearing.

Support for Mr Kavanaugh has remained relatively stable, the polling showed, rising slightly after the hearing.

Opposition rose among Democrats by 6 percentage points to 71 percent and was relatively unchanged among people unaffiliated with a political party compared to before the hearing, according to the poll. Support among Republicans stood at 70 percent, rising 4 percentage points in the days after the hearing, but was lower among Republican women, at 64 percent.

Among independents and people unaffiliated with a political party, 31 percent opposed Mr Kavanaugh, 20 percent supported him and 49 percent said they did not know.

The fight over Mr Kavanaugh’s nomination comes against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement fighting sexual harassment and assault that has toppled a succession of powerful men.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English. It gathered responses from 4,057 U.S. adults, including 1,347 Republicans and 1,653 Democrats. It has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 2 percentage points.

A previous Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday revealed four in 10 Americans believed the sexual assault allegations against Mr Kavanaugh, while three in ten and the rest of respondents did not know.

The responses were divided largely along partisan lines - about two-thirds of Democrats said they believed the allegations and nearly two-thirds of Republicans said they did not.

That response echoed a recent YouGov poll, which found that the country was split over their testimonies, with 41 per cent saying that they believed Dr Ford and 35 per cent saying they believed the Supreme Court nominee.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted after the allegations were publicized, also found that 41 percent of adults opposed Mr Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. That was up about 5 percentage points from a similar poll conducted from Sept. 18-24.

When it came to the allegations of sexual misconduct, the poll found that Americans who are younger, more educated and single were more likely to believe the allegations than those who are older, less educated and married.

Reuters contributed to this report.