When the Supreme Court splits 5-4, and the liberal bloc wins, Brett Kavanaugh is on their side more than half the time.
Newsweek reported that data from the Supreme Court Database, as cited by SCOTUSblog, shows that since the 2020-2021 term, Kavanaugh has joined the liberal majority in 52 percent of 5-4 cases where a liberal justice was in the majority.
Neil Gorsuch sits at 43 percent. Amy Coney Barrett comes in at 22 percent.
All three were appointed by President Trump during his first term. Only one routinely hands liberals the fifth vote they need.
The raw percentages deserve a closer look, because they reveal something more than a single justice drifting left. They reveal distinct judicial personalities among the three Trump appointees.
Kavanaugh joins the liberal majority at the highest rate — 52 percent — but rarely joins them in dissent. His rate of siding with the liberal bloc in losing 5-4 causes is just 7 percent. That means Kavanaugh isn't a philosophical fellow traveler with the left. He's a swing vote — someone who moves to the liberal side when it's going to win, not when it's going to lose. He's not joining lost causes. He's joining winning coalitions.
Gorsuch, by contrast, presents a different profile entirely. He joined the liberal majority in 43 percent of these close cases but sided with the liberal dissent in 40 percent of them. Across all 5-4 decisions, Gorsuch joined the liberal justices roughly 44 percent of the time.
His breaks from the conservative majority appear more ideologically driven — a libertarian streak that occasionally lands him in unexpected company regardless of which side prevails.
Barrett is the most reliable of the three. She sided with the liberal majority in just 22 percent of these cases and joined the liberal dissent 20 percent of the time. Consistent, predictable, and firmly planted on the right side of the bench.
Adam Feldman, a recurring columnist at SCOTUSblog, put it plainly:
"This pattern is striking but the results are clear: When liberals win narrowly, Kavanaugh is the conservative justice most likely to be part of the winning coalition."
Conservatives fought for a generation to build a 6-3 Supreme Court. The Federalist Society pipeline, the brutal confirmation battles, the political capital spent — all of it aimed at producing a court that would interpret the Constitution as written, not as progressives wished it read.
A 6-3 majority should be commanding. But a 6-3 majority with a reliable swing vote is functionally a 5-4 court — and Kavanaugh's pattern suggests that on the cases that come down to a single justice, the conservative supermajority shrinks to a coin flip.
This isn't about demanding lockstep agreement. No serious person expects nine justices — or even six — to rule identically on every case. Judicial independence matters, and cases that reach the Supreme Court are genuinely difficult. The easy ones get settled lower down.
But the pattern matters because 5-4 decisions are, by definition, the ones where the legal arguments are closest and judicial philosophy carries the most weight.
These are the cases where the composition of the court is supposed to matter most. And in those cases, Kavanaugh sides with the liberal outcome more often than not.
A Marquette Law School poll conducted January 21 to 28 — surveying 1,003 adults with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points — found that Kavanaugh carries the lowest net favorability rating among Supreme Court justices.
Just 21 percent of U.S. adults view him favorably, while 28 percent hold an unfavorable opinion, putting his net favorability at minus 7.
Other justices also received negative net favorability ratings, but Kavanaugh sits at the bottom. That's a remarkable position for a justice whose confirmation fight turned him into a cause célèbre for the right. Conservatives rallied around him during one of the ugliest confirmation processes in modern memory. The left savaged him. And now neither side seems particularly pleased with what they got.
The left will never forgive him for existing on the court. The right increasingly wonders what it purchased with all that political capital.
There's a crucial distinction between a justice who reaches unexpected conclusions through originalist reasoning and a justice who gravitates toward the majority coalition. Gorsuch's breaks from the right, whatever you think of them, tend to follow a discernible libertarian logic — they happen win or lose.
Kavanaugh's breaks happen overwhelmingly when the liberals are already winning. That 52-to-7 split between joining liberal majorities and liberal dissents isn't a sign of independent thinking. It's a sign of coalition management.
The current term runs through June, and the cases still to be decided will test whether this pattern holds or shifts. But for conservatives watching the court they spent decades building, the data from the past several terms sends an uncomfortable signal.
A 6-3 court means nothing if the sixth vote keeps walking across the aisle.
