Firm majority of Americans back SCOTUS on affirmative action decision: Poll

A firm majority of Americans back the Supreme Court’s decision to gut affirmative action in college admissions, according to a new poll.

The ABC News/Ipsos survey showed 52% of Americans approve the decision, 32% disapprove, and 16% don’t know.

Results varied by race and party affiliation: 75% of Republicans and 58% of independent voters approve the 6–3 Supreme Court decision, compared with 26% of Democrats.

In a breakdown by race, 60% of white respondents, 58% of Asians, 40% of Hispanics and 25% of black respondents favored the landmark ruling.

As a result of the high court’s decision, colleges and universities will not be restricted from using race as a factor in college admission standards.

They can, however, still rely on factors like whether applicants speak multiple languages or come from lower-income backgrounds.

Despite favoring the ruling, 53% of respondents believed the justices made their decision more on their partisanship views than the law, and 33% felt it derived more from interpretations of the law, the poll found. Fourteen percent said they didn’t know.

The two companion cases that led to the affirmative action were Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.

Plaintiffs in the both cases cited various studies and data points from those universities to raise concerns about affirmative action having detrimental effects on Asian applicants.

For instance, an Asian candidate at Harvard in the eighth highest academic decile had a 5.1% chance of admittance, compared with 7.5% for a white applicant, 22.9% for a Hispanic candidate, and 44.5% for black applicants, according to a brief filed in favor of the plaintiffs.

Criticsof the high court’s decision also contend it’ll have negative ramifications for marginalized communities.

“Affirmative action was never a complete answer in the drive towards a more just society,” former President Barack Obama said in a statement.

“But for generations of students who had been systematically excluded from most of America’s key institutions—it gave us the chance to show we more than deserved a seat at the table.”

The poll of 937 voters, conducted from June 30-July 1, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

Other polls have pegged similar sentiments on affirmative action — including a CBS poll before the Supreme Court decision that found 30% of voters believed colleges should be allowed to consider race in admissions while 70% felt they should not.