Bruce Bartlett points me to a C-SPAN survey that, among other things, asks people if they can name any Supreme Court justices. Here are the results:
That thin orange line that’s zero across the entire bottom of the chart is the number of people who named Stephen Breyer. Poor guy. However, it’s still possible that he was the first choice of at least a few people. The survey size was 1,032 people, so anything less than five would get rounded down to zero. Breyer might very well have been named by three or four people.
Anyway, the two big takeaways are (a) the older you are, the more likely you are to know at least one justice, and (b) Ruth Bader Ginsburg kicks ass. Even the chief justice isn’t better known than her. Good job, RBG.
Of course, they’d all have better Q scores if they followed the advice of 76 percent of the public and allowed arguments to be televised.
