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Activists carry caricatures of Supreme Court justices Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene peaks with people outside of the Supreme Court on Tuesday, December 1st, as the justices began hearing oral arguments in a case that challenges abortion rights in the United States.
Tipping the scales: How the 2024 presidential election could define the future of the Supreme Court
Everyone knows a lot is at stake in next week’s election, with voters deciding between two candidates with vastly different visions for the United States. But the stakes may be highest at the Supreme Court, where the next president could determine whether the court swings back toward an ideological equilibrium or if the Republican-appointed majority gets even stronger, potentially ensuring conservative dominance for decades to come.
The Supreme Court increasingly acts like a legislative body. And with Congress riddled with partisan gridlock, it is also increasingly the most politically influential branch of the federal government, requiring only a five-person majority to make groundbreaking decisions on rights, regulations, and the rule of law.
When Donald Trump was last in office, he appointed JusticesNeil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, giving the Supreme Court its current 6-3 conservative majority. This has allowed for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the expansion of 2nd Amendment gun rights, and the limitation of federal agencies’ power to regulate the environment, public health, workplace hazards, and many other issues pertaining to their offices. It was also responsible for the landmark ruling in Trump v. United States, which gave presidents immunity from criminal prosecution.
Since then, President Joe Biden replaced Democratic-appointed Justice Stephen Breyer with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, keeping the ideological balance of the court the same.
How will the next president affect the makeup of the Supreme Court?
“I would expect at least one vacancy depending on whoever wins on either side,” predicts Emily Bazelon, a senior fellow at Yale Law School, “but possibly more because sometimes life events or health intervene.”
If Kamala Harris wins the presidency, the oldest Democratic-appointed justice, Sonia Sotomayor, would likely step down, giving the Democrats the power to replace her with someone younger. Supreme Court justices serve for life, so appointing a younger judge is a way of projecting political power, sometimes decades into the future. If a Republican-appointed judge steps down under Harris, the court would swing back towards a more even 5-4 majority.
On the other side, if Trump wins the presidency, 74-year-old Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas would be highly likely to step down, giving the conservative side of the bench four judges under the age of 60 (two of which are already 55 or younger). The second oldest justice, 72-year-old Samuel Alito, could also potentially retire.
If one of the Democratic-appointed justices were to step down under a Trump administration, that would create a rock-solid 7-2 Conservative majority, which is likely to have real policy implications. “The more people you can choose from to make a majority, the less you have to worry about internal differences,” says Bazelon. “Getting a majority vote of five just gets easier.”
She expects that a 7-2 majority may further limit states’ and cities’ abilities to restrict firearms or to provide emergency abortion services when women experience complications late in pregnancy.
“The more robustly conservative the court is, the more ambitious the right-wing agenda becomes,” Bazelon added.
Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris meets employees as she visits Hemlock Semiconductor in Hemlock, during her campaign trip to Michigan, U.S., October 28, 2024.
Election Countdown: 4 things you need to know in the last week of US presidential race
The final week of the 2024 presidential campaign is upon us, with early voting in full swing, absentee ballots in the mail, and the polls too close to call. With seven days left before Election Day, here are the four things you need to know.
1. It’s going to come down to the seven swing states. The candidates need 270 electoral college votes to win, and some combination of Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada are likely to be the states that deliver the Electoral College to the next president.
Many states lean toward one party or are at least gerrymandered to make it likely their votes go that way. If both candidates win the states where they are heavily favored, Harris would still need 44 electoral votes from the tossup states to win, and Trump would need 51. Pennsylvania is getting the most attention because, according to election analyst Nate Silver, the candidate who wins Pennsylvania has more than a 90% chance of winning the White House.
Because of this, the two candidates are concentrating their efforts on the swing states in the last week. Kamala Harris visited Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Monday, and her running mate Tim Walz held down the fort in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Donald Trump held a rally in Atlanta, Georgia.
Because of this, the two candidates are concentrating their efforts on the swing states in the last week. Kamala Harris visited Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Monday, and her running mate Tim Walz held down the fort in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Donald Trump held a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, and JD Vance also went to Wisconsin, where he defended racist comments made by speaker comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at the Madison Square Garden rally. Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
“We have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I'm just — I'm so over it,“ said Vance.
2. It’s incredibly close. The New York Times reports that polls are getting even tighter in the final days of the campaign, with Harris ahead by just one point nationally. In the swing state polls, neither candidate has a lead that exceeds the margin of error.
3. Both candidates are making their closing arguments. Harris will deliver a speech at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, on Tuesday evening that is expected to draw nearly 20,000 people, rivaling the size of Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden on Sunday.
In New York, in the last major event of the campaign trail, Trump and his allies’ speeches were full of anger at the political system and used rhetoric that railed against the state of the economy and immigrants – often in openly racist terms.
At the rally in DC, Harris will stand at the same place where on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump delivered remarks to his supporters who went on to storm the US Capitol. The location choice is no accident, as Harris is expected to make her last major speech about Trump posing a threat to democracy. Whether that will motivate voters to the polls is up for debate, as recent Gallup polling shows that the economy is the biggest issue for voters, followed by democracy, national security, and potential Supreme Court picks.
4. Expect results a lot sooner than in 2020, when the last election took nearly five days to decide because more than 43% of all ballots were mailed in due to the COVID pandemic.
Since then, many states have updated their policies to allow them to start counting absentee ballots before Election Night – including swing states like Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina – and fewer absentee ballots are expected overall. The fact that the election is likely to hinge on just a few states means that a result could be clear by the middle of the night or by early morning the next day.
The only hold-ups could come from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, especially if the election is very close because neither state allows for envelope processing to begin before Election Day.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled Tuesday that certifying elections is a required duty of county election boards in Georgia, and they’re not allowed to refuse to finalize results based on suspicions of miscounts or fraud.
Trump faces setback in Georgia
Trump previously praised the three right-wing board members who formed a conservative majority on the board and pushed the rule through as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
But Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said Tuesday that the rule “is too much, too late.”
Earlier in the day, McBurney in a separate case also said that local election officials “have a mandatory fixed obligation to certify election results," in another blow for Trump allies who’ve contended results could be delayed over fraud concerns.
Georgia was at the heart of Trump’s push to overturn the election results in 2020, which ultimately led to him being indicted.
Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff visit a watch party after Harris participated in a presidential debate with Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 10, 2024.
Harris won the debate, but will it matter on Election Day?
The presidential debate marks the unofficial point of the race when the majority of Americans start paying attention. As the dust begins to settle from Tuesday night’s showdown, early polls show Kamala Harris winning the debate 63% to 37%, according to a CNN poll, while YouGov’s poll has her winning 54% to 31% among registered voters who watched at least some of the debate, with 14% unsure.
Both Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton beat Donald Trump by even larger margins in 2020 and 2016, but only one of them went on to beat him in the electoral college on Election Day. So the question remains: Will the debate matter?
This is “the major unknown,” says Eurasia Group’s US analyst Noah Daponte-Smith. “I tend to think it won’t matter very much.”
“There are very few ‘gettable’ voters left, and polling has been remarkably stable in the race so far, with very little movement since Harris’ post-nomination ascendancy ended,” he explains.
Early polls also show that Harris didn’t change minds on the big issues. Despite her win, debate watchers still preferred Trump by 20 points on the economy and 23 points on immigration.
The real determining factor in a race this tight will be turnout. Harris may have won a few more supporters with a shining debate performance, but she needs to convince them to show up on Election Day. Meanwhile, Trump’s camp will be mobilized by the motivation to vote Democrats out of the Oval Office. With early voting kicking off next week in key states like Pennsylvania, we will be watching which candidate can drive more of their voters to the polls.
U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris waves to the crowd during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, U.S., August 7, 2024.
Is Harris now the favorite?
In the days before President Joe Biden withdrew from November’s presidential election, Republican nominee Donald Trump was widely considered the favorite to win. But with the entrance of Vice President Kamala Harris into the race, most analysts now consider the race a toss-up. For now, Harris has the momentum in many polls. What would it take for her to be considered the favorite?
By some measures, Harris already has a slight advantage. Election analyst Nate Silver’s model, an aggregator of other respected polls, currently has Harris leading Trump nationally by 45.8% to 43.7%. She also holds (very) narrow leads in swing states Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, while Trump leads by equally thin margins in Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. Other analysts and prediction sites show similar results.
For Harris to become the favorite, she’ll need a lead of three points or more nationally over a couple of weeks, because the electoral college probably provides Trump the same advantage he enjoyed in 2016 and George W. Bush held in 2000. In both those cases, the Republican won the election despite losing the national popular vote.
But Harris must also post 2-3% polling margins in either Pennsylvania or Georgia, perhaps the two most evenly split states in the country. That result would signal Harris is likely to earn the 270 electoral votes she needs to win the White House.
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Harris for President Campaign Rally on Tuesday July 23, 2024 at West Allis Central High School in West Allis, Wis.
Obamas endorse Kamala Harris for president
Barack and Michelle ObamaendorsedKamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for US president on Friday, joining other high-profile Democratic Party leaders in backing the vice president’s bid for the White House.
“We called to say Michelle and I couldn’t be prouder to endorse you and to do everything we can to get you through this election and into the Oval Office,” the former president told Harris.
The announcement capped a big first week for Harris. Her campaign raised a whopping $231 million in just a few days, and Harris has already started to narrow Donald Trump’s lead in key swing states. Although she is still behind in four of the five states, she has substantiallyclosed the gap left by President Joe Biden.
Trump’s biggest lead is in Arizona, where he stands 5 points above Harris. But when Biden was the nominee, Trump was ahead by 10 points. The former president is now ahead of Harris by only 2 points in Georgia and Pennsylvania; by 1 point in Michigan; and in Wisconsin, the candidates are tied.
As Harris narrows the gap, she is alsobreaking fundraising records and galvanizing youth voters. But it is too soon to tell whether this momentum is sustainable or just a short-term swell of enthusiasm following Biden’s decision to exit the race.
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Interested in who Harris might choose as her vice-presidential running mate? Click here to learn about the contenders.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at her Presidential Campaign headquarters in Wilmington, DE, U.S., July 22, 2024.
Harris and Trump plot new campaign strategies
InKamala Harris’ previous run for president, her campaign was plagued with so much public infighting she was forced towithdraw before the first primary votes were cast. In addition, herapproval ratings during her time as vice president have sometimes fallen below President Joe Biden’s.
So how has she generated so much excitement among Democratic voters and donors so quickly?
Between Biden’s withdrawal announcement on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening, the Harris for President campaign says it raisedmore than $100 million, a huge haul by any standard. That adds to the party’s already formidable fundraising this year. Credible Democratic Party challengers quickly endorsed her. By Monday night, Harris had secured enough delegates to lock down the party’s presidential nomination.
In part, her success is a sign of Donald Trump’s perceived weakness. The media’s recent focus on Biden’s unpopularity has obscured the reality that a majority of Americans –57% in a recent poll – want Trump out of the race too. That figure includes 51% of independents and 26% of Republicans. Add the reality that Biden’s exit from the race leaves Trump, 78, as the oldest person ever to win the nomination of a major party for president. Trump remains the betting favorite, but Dems believe, rightly or wrongly, that he’s beatable.
And for anyone wondering what strategy Harris might adopt against Trump, there’s this obvious clue from her first speech as a presidential candidate. Highlighting both her history as a prosecutor and Trump’s status as a convicted felon: “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Much of the media attention on the Harris campaign will now focus on her choice of a vice-presidential running-mate. But there’s another looming question: Will Harris and Trump debate? ABC News is scheduled to host a second presidential debate on Sept. 10, but Trump has already cast doubt on his plans to attend. Heposted the following on his Truth Social account:
“My debate with Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the history of the United States, was slated to be broadcast on Fake News ABC, the home of George Slopadopolus, sometime in September. Now that Joe has, not surprisingly, has [sic] quit the race, I think the Debate, with whomever the Radical Left Democrats choose, should be held on FoxNews, rather than very biased ABC. “
Beyond that, Trump is keeping his options open.
Finally, Trump faces another challenge he didn’t expect: His new opponent is a woman of African and South Asian descent. He defeated Hillary Clinton eight years ago, but Harris doesn’t come with Clinton’s considerable baggage, and there are plenty of women and people of color who will listen carefully to Trump’s every word for signs of bias against women and/or racial minorities.
In short, Trump faces an opponent with no history of national electoral success of her own but one who poses a series of campaign dangers he didn’t face until Sunday.