One of our “goals here at the Monkey Cage”:https://themonkeycage.org/2007/11/why_this_blog.html is to inject political science research into public discussion of contemporary political issues. With Obama’s announcement of the “nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court”:http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/26/sotomayor.bio/index.html, the airwaves are filled with news of the great political machines on both sides of the aisle “gearing up for a big fight”:http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/26/sotomayor-lightweight/. I think I even heard a commentator on the radio this morning say that the base on both sides lives for this sort of thing.
So I thought it would be interesting to see what political scientists have to say about the _long term_ effects of Supreme Court nomination battles on the popularity of (a) presidents or (b) political parties? In other words, does the fight matter for anything more than just whether or not the individual in question gets confirmed, or are there other lasting repercussions? If you’ve written on this topic, please add a comment to this post with a link to your research and a paper abstract. If I get enough responses, I’ll put up another post here with a summary.
And as as an aside on the subject of whether or not she gets confirmed is concerned, Intrade has got her trading at about $.95 on the dollar to be the next “Supreme Court justice”:http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/contractSearch/index.jsp?query=Sotomayor (in a contract that expires only upon confirmation) and Larry Sabato is predicting that “Sonia Sotomayor is a slam dunk to be confirmed”:http://www.politico.com/arena/perm/Larry_J__Sabato_130A300A-126F-4189-AF30-7504FC46AD69.html.