Donors Care Far More About Supreme Court Picks Than Ordinary Partisans

Why This Question Matters

Supreme Court nominations are among the most high-profile political events in the United States, but how core constituency groups prioritize those nominations relative to other issues is not well understood. Brandice Canes-Wrone, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Nicolas Studen ask whether individual political donors place greater importance on judicial appointments than the mass public and what criteria each group thinks presidents should weigh when choosing judges.

Survey Design and Samples

The authors fielded original survey questions to two samples: a validated panel of over 7,000 individual political donors and a comparison sample drawn from the general population. The survey asked respondents to rank the importance of Supreme Court nominations relative to other political issues and to indicate which attributes presidents should consider when selecting judges (for example, ideology, diversity, professional qualifications).

What the Analysis Shows

• Donors are substantially more likely than similarly partisan members of the general public to prioritize Supreme Court nominations. The gap is especially large among Republican donors.
• Patterns in the data are consistent with theories that donors are motivated to move policy toward ideological extremes rather than simply reflect the average preferences of co-partisans.
• When comparing specific criteria for appointments, differences between donors and the public are smaller than the gap in prioritization; the single largest donor-public divergence on appointment criteria concerns diversity in appointments.

Implications for Politics and Representation

The findings suggest that donors’ issue prioritization — not just their stated policy preferences — may pull elite decision-making (including presidential choices over nominees) away from general public priorities. Because donors disproportionately emphasize nominations and appear oriented toward more extreme policy outcomes, their influence could reshape how parties and presidents allocate attention and signals in judicial selection.

What Readers Should Take Away

This article highlights an underappreciated dimension of donor influence: donors prioritize Supreme Court nominations more strongly than co-partisan members of the public, a difference that could affect how presidents and parties weigh nominations in broader political strategy and governance.