Nevertheless, Republican unity hasn’t cracked — to date only two GOP senators, Susan Collins and Mark Kirk, have said they support granting Garland a hearing.

But what’s notable is this: not only are Republicans losing on this issue, they can’t even keep their own voters in line.

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Two different liberal groups are out with polls today showing voters overwhelmingly supporting Garland’s nomination: this national one conducted for Americans United for Change shows voters saying by 58-37 that the seat should be filled this year, and 65 percent saying that Garland should at least get a hearing. They also trust Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama over Donald Trump to fill the seat, by margins of 15 and 16 points respectively. This poll from the Center for American Progress shows similar numbers, with 69 percent saying the Senate should give Garland a hearing and an up-or-down vote. And both show substantial numbers of voters saying they’ll be less likely to vote for a senator who opposes giving Garland a hearing. Though these are partisan polls, their results aren’t too different from what media polls on the topic have shown.

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These polls and others show that significant numbers of Republicans are contradicting the position of their party, which is that we should wait until the next president is elected to fill this seat. Why is that?

Before we answer that question, some context. Under ordinary circumstances, voters take their cues from the elites of their own party on what they should think about new issues as they arise. If you suddenly see all the people you admire and agree with — politicians, pundits, and so on — taking one side of an issue that you hadn’t thought much about before, in short order you’ll probably come to agree with them. This effect was laid out in John Zaller’s classic work The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, in which he demonstrated that on issues where the parties disagree, people with higher levels of political awareness are more polarized, because they’re more attuned to what their party’s elites are, in effect, telling them to believe.

In fact, it would be odd if it didn’t work that way. If you’re, say, a Republican voter who might be open to the idea that the Affordable Care Act has worked out pretty well, you’re going to have to do a lot of work to arrive at that opinion, and overcome some serious cognitive dissonance. Every time you hear anyone talk about it, it’ll be either someone you dislike intensely (e.g. Barack Obama) telling you that the ACA is working, or someone you admire and respect (e.g. Paul Ryan or Rush Limbaugh) telling you it’s a disaster. And since you probably get more of your news from conservative sources, you’re going to hear many more arguments for why it’s bad than arguments for why it’s good.

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But even if that’s how things go much of the time, there are exceptions. There are times when a party’s elite is unable to convince its rank-and-file to share its position, or at least unable to convince them all. For instance, polls regularly show that significant numbers of Republicans think the wealthy don’t pay enough taxes (45 percent in this Pew poll), despite the fact that the Republican Party’s position is precisely the opposite, that the wealthy pay too much. You usually find this contradiction on issues that are relatively easy to understand and where people are able to incorporate evidence from their own lives — or simple common sense — that might contradict what their party is telling them.

How does this relate to Garland? The bottom line is that Republicans just don’t have a good case to make, and you don’t need to know a great deal about the topic to understand it. They aren’t invoking any fundamental principle that would rally fellow conservatives to their cause. They invented something they called “the Biden rule” based on nothing but a suggestion Joe Biden made a couple of decades ago, which was never actually tested in reality, to justify their position. So nobody can honestly say that there’s anything but naked partisanship at work here: they’d just rather have one of their guys in that seat, and if obstructing the Garland nomination is what it takes to make that possible, then that’s what they’ll do.

When you watch Republicans try to make the case that there’s a more profound justification than that for their position, you can tell even they don’t believe it. That’s why, for instance, Sen. Jeff Flake admitted yesterday that “If we come to a point––I’ve said all along––where we’re going to lose the election in November, then we ought to approve him quickly, because I’m certain he’ll be more conservative than a Hillary Clinton nomination.” But what about the hallowed Biden Rule? Eh, whatever — you know we don’t mean that.

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I’ve been arguing for some time that the Supreme Court should be the most important issue in this presidential campaign, but it obviously won’t be. Nevertheless, it could play an important role in Senate races, particularly for a few vulnerable Republicans. And it’s even made at least one Republican who was thought to have an easy ride to reelection — Chuck Grassley, whose position as chair of the Judiciary Committee makes him the obstructor-in-chief — suddenly vulnerable. Grassley’s approval numbers are declining, and Democrats recruited a strong challenger to oppose him. If there’s a big turnout of voters going to the polls to stop Donald Trump, Grassley could lose.

Even if the Republican Party had nominated a mainstream figure for president, the Garland nomination would have raised some difficult questions for Republican senators running for re-election. But with Trump capturing the nomination, it gets worse. Now, senators in tough campaigns, most of whom are saying some version of either “Maybe I’ll endorse Trump if he becomes less of a jerk” or “I’ll support my party’s nominee even though I won’t like it,” are now having to answer an uncomfortable question. President Obama nominated what most people would agree is a jurist meant to be as acceptable as possible to Republicans, people will say to them. Yet you won’t even give him a hearing, let alone a vote, and you’d rather let Donald freaking Trump appoint someone to the Court?