A new Economist/YouGov poll is a rich text for political observers of the Supreme Court. The Court is unpopular (only 36 percent of American adults approve). It is loathed by Democrats (80 percent of whom disapprove of the Court). And its approval among Republicans is surprisingly soft, given that the GOP controls six of the nine seats on the Court. Only 69 percent of Republicans approve.

The least popular justice, meanwhile, is Justice Amy Coney Barrett. 

In the rush of major rulings that the justices handed down at the end of June, Barrett joined two 5-4 decisions that ruled against Trump and his Republican Party. And not just on any issues, but two that have become increasingly central to the MAGA-era right: elections and immigration.

For many Supreme Court experts, the biggest surprise in both cases is that the vote was so close. In Watson v. Republican National Committee (2026), Republicans challenged a Mississippi law that allowed ballots that are mailed before Election Day, but that arrive up to five days later, to be counted — despite the fact that states have counted late-arriving ballots since the Civil War. And, in Trump v. Barbara (2026), Barrett also rejected Trump’s argument that a constitutional provision, that makes most people born in the United States citizens, has been misread by the Supreme Court for nearly 130 years.

But these decisions sparked angry responses from many of Trump’s allies, who had built up the ballot case into a bulwark against nonexistent election fraud touted by the president and the birthright citizenship case into a last stand against often-conspiratorial fears of an immigration “invasion.”

Watson fueled unsupported claims from Republicans like Justice Samuel Alito that “counting late-arriving ballots” would allow fraudsters “to stuff ballot boxes when early election results suggest a tight race.” Barbara, meanwhile, inspired fears that foreign nationals are coming to the United States in droves to give birth to US citizens.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) called for Barrett to be “removed from the Bench.” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) called her Watson opinion “shocking” and “terrible.” Matt Walsh, a podcaster with over 4 million followers on X, labeled her a “DEI hire.” Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, said Barrett is a “turncoat.” One of the most offensive reactions to Barrett, by right-wing pastor Joel Webbon, suggested that she’s unfit for judicial service, because she adopted two Black children.

Trump fumed about the decisions, but didn’t single out Barrett specifically. In 2025, CNN reported that the man who put Barrett on the Supreme Court had complained privately that she is “weak.”

The backlash against Barrett is not universal. She has many prominent defenders among Republicans. And any suggestion that she’s some kind of centrist squish is not supported by the facts. Rather than make that case myself, I will simply quote the National Review’s argument that Barrett is a very conservative justice who has handed victory after victory to Republican causes:

Barrett has stood courageously with her colleagues in one landmark conservative victory after another: overturning Roe v. Wade amidst threats to the justices’ safety, fortifying the Second Amendment, ending racial preferences, rejecting transgender ideology, protecting religious liberty, expanding space for school choice, reining in the administrative state, closing down avenues to attack secure elections, restricting nationwide injunctions by rogue district judges, swatting down lawfare that sought to jail Trump and throw him off the ballot, and blocking one after another of Joe Biden’s overreaches. This term has been no different, with Barrett joining decisions ending racially gerrymandered districts, allowing Trump to fire agency heads at will, protecting girls’ sports from male transgender athletes, and defending the religious free speech of crisis pregnancy centers and counselors against gender transition.

Still, the latest polling does suggest that voices like Mace, Walsh, and Kelly are shaping how much of the Republican Party views Barrett. And Trump’s 2025 complaint about her suggests that anyone he appoints to the Court in the future is unlikely to show even the dash of moderation that Barrett has displayed. Last April, Trump labeled Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s most unapologetic Republican partisan, “one of the great justices of all time.”

So why does Barrett sometimes break with MAGA?

Ironically, the two most MAGA-aligned justices were not appointed by Trump. They are Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, Republicans appointed by the first and second Bush presidents — although there are some early signs that Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, may be moving in Alito’s direction.

One possible explanation for the Trump justices’ imperfect loyalty to him is that Trump relied heavily on the Federalist Society, a kind of bar association for conservative lawyers, to choose his first-term judges and justices. While the Federalist Society often promotes right-wing legal theories, its goals do not always align with Trump’s. At a Federalist Society conference in the spring of 2025, for example, numerous speakers criticized Trump’s tariffs — criticism that foreshadowed the Court’s decision striking many of those tariffs down. Notably, Trump had a falling out with Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society’s board, early in his second term.

Still, Barrett’s ties to the Federalist Society cannot entirely explain why she breaks with Trump more often than Thomas and Alito, as the latter two justices are also proud members of the society who frequently speak at its major events. The most likely reason why Barrett sometimes breaks with Trump is more banal: Lawyers cannot see the future.

All Supreme Court justices are heavily vetted by White House or Justice Department lawyers to ensure that they are ideologically reliable. But this vetting can only accomplish so much. If a vacancy opened up on the Supreme Court today, Trump’s White House could ensure that anyone he appointed would share the same views that the Republican Party holds today. But it obviously could not anticipate what the Republican Party will want to accomplish a decade from now and pick justices who will advance that agenda.

Consider, for example, Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican who President George W. Bush appointed in 2005. At the time, one of the most contentious questions before the federal courts was whether Bush could detain suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, and Roberts was a reliable vote in favor of Bush’s views on this issue. Roberts’s record also indicated that he agreed with conservative Republicans on a wide range of issues they had firm positions on in 2005, such as voting rights or how the Constitution approaches issues of race.

But the Bush White House could not have known that, more than a year after Bush left office, Bush’s successor would sign healthcare legislation that the Republican Party hated with supernova-like intensity. And so, Roberts cast the key vote to save most of Obamacare in 2012, even though all four of his Republican colleagues at the time dissented.

Barrett’s breaks with MAGA are similar to Roberts’s vote in the Obamacare case. They typically involve questions that weren’t on the Trump White House’s radar when she was appointed in 2020 and that often still divide Republicans today. 

In much the same way that Guantanamo Bay drove Bush’s selection of Roberts, Republicans in 2020 were focused on replacing the late pro-choice Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with an opponent of abortion, and Barrett fit that bill. She joined the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.

But Republicans have evolved since Trump chose Barrett for the Supreme Court. During the Covid-era election that Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, Trump started attacking voting by mail. These attacks shifted voting patterns — Democrats are now more likely to mail their ballots than Republicans — and high-level Republicans noticed this shift. Watson was an attempt to semi-randomly toss out a bunch of mailed ballots on the theory that doing so would disproportionately hurt Democrats.

But the GOP’s turn against mail-in balloting was still in its infancy when Barrett was nominated in September of 2020. It likely never occurred to the White House lawyers who vetted Barrett to investigate whether she would vote to strike down a law like Mississippi’s.

Similarly, the birthright citizenship question at the heart of Barbara was one of the most uncontroversial questions in US law until Trump attempted to abolish birthright citizenship in 2025. When Judge John Coughenour, the Reagan appointee who was the first judge to reject Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, announced his decision, he declared that he’s “been on the bench for over four decades,” and he “can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”

Yet, whatever can be said about the GOP’s views in 2020, when Barrett was appointed, Barrett’s views on election law and citizenship are now wildly out of step with an ascendant faction within the Republican Party. Vice President JD Vance labeled birthright citizenship the “dumbest immigration policy in the world.” 

That’s one reason to keep an eye on the MAGA backlash against Barrett. Future Republican White Houses are more likely to vet any judicial nominee very closely to make sure that they will vote to abolish birthright citizenship, regardless of what the Constitution says.