Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll of the week

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is embroiled in multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, and after Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, his future on the court may be in jeopardy. But regardless of what the Senate decides, recent polls indicate he has lost support among the American public. Polls have also shown a gender divide: Women were more likely than men to oppose Kavanaugh and more likely to believe Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations. But as we’ve reported before, a person’s party might still be a better indicator of how they feel about Kavanaugh’s nomination than their gender is. So we were somewhat surprised when, earlier this week, a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted before Thursday’s hearing reported an 18-point drop in net approval among Republican women.

To get a better sense of why some Republican women are breaking ranks, we reached out to pollsters who had asked about public support for Kavanaugh and asked them to send us results filtered by Republican women. But as you can see in the table below, we found that results so far don’t show a reliable trend among GOP women’s views of Kavanaugh. Rather, there is quite a bit of noise among the three polls we looked at, which could partly be attributable to the larger margin of error attached to any results pulled from a subset of a poll. While the Politico/Morning Consult poll found that Kavanaugh’s net support among Republican women had dropped by 18 points, HuffPost/YouGov found a 12-point net gain among that same group, and YouGov/Economist found a smaller net gain of 2 points.

GOP women may — or may not — be abandoning Kavanaugh It depends on which poll you’re looking at Previous Poll Most Recent Poll Pollster End Date Net Support End Date Net Support Change Huffpost/YouGov Sept. 18 +65 Sept. 22 +77 +12 Morning Consult/Politico Sept. 19 +52 Sept. 23 +34 -18 YouGov/Economist Sept. 18 +55 Sept. 25 +57 +2

So what do we make of this? There are a number of reasons polls can vary significantly, including the technique used to contact respondents, the sample size, how the questions are worded and when the poll is taken. The Morning Consult polls had a fairly small sample size of Republican women, as did the other polls we assessed. This is common when surveying a subset of a population, but it can mean that, as we mentioned, the margin of error is somewhat larger for these groups than it is for the full sample. Another complicating factor is that the Morning Consult polls were being conducted while new allegations of Kavanaugh’s sexual misconduct were still emerging. As Jeff Cartwright, a managing director at Morning Consult, told us, “The thing about our poll is that it was coming out of the field just as that New Yorker story,” in which a college classmate accused Kavanaugh of shoving his penis in her face, “went up on Sunday, so it doesn’t even take that into account right now.” This means Kavanaugh’s support among conservative women could now be much worse (or much better) than these polls show. It’s still too early to tell.

That said, there is evidence that Kavanaugh’s public support declined this week, with recent polls showing his net approval rating anywhere between -3 and -6 points. Kavanaugh is a historically unpopular Supreme Court nominee, but if we go back to the beginning of July when polls first started asking about his confirmation, we can see that his net approval rating became increasingly negative in the days after the first allegations of sexual misconduct became public.

Now that the confirmation hearing is over, polls in the coming weeks will hopefully give us a clearer and more accurate view of how voters (including women overall and Republican women) feel about Kavanaugh.

Other polling nuggets

Trump approval

Polls this week showed an overall uptick in Trump’s approval rating. His net approval rating currently sits at -11.3 percentage points, according to our tracker. (That’s a 41.5 percent approval rating and a 52.8 percent disapproval rating.) That’s an increase net approval from one week ago, when it stood at -13.1 points; 40.5 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance and 53.6 percent disapproved. At this time last month, that net approval was -12.4 points — 41.4 percent approval, 53.6 percent disapproval.

Generic ballot

According to our tracker of generic congressional ballot polls, Americans currently opt for a hypothetical Democratic House candidate over a hypothetical Republican by a 8.7-point margin (49.6 percent to 40.9 percent). Democrats have gained support from one week ago, when they led by 8.8 points (49.2 percent to 40.4 percent). One month ago, the Democrats had a 7.7-point advantage, 47.6 percent to 39.9 percent.

Check out our 2018 House and Senate forecasts and all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the midterms.

CORRECTION (Sept. 28, 3:30 p.m.): A previous version of this article gave the wrong rank for former military officer Jair Bolsonaro. He was a captain, not a general.