The first such story was released the previous Sunday by The Washington Post. That report outlined an alleged incident in 1982 in which Kavanaugh was accused of having pinned down and assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, now a professor in California. The Fox News poll, conducted Sept. 16 through Sept. 19 — in other words, overlapping with the early days of the Ford allegation story — reflected opinions on that incident. More than half of Republicans (and Trump voters and white evangelical Protestants) believed Kavanaugh’s denial over Ford’s allegation.

Because of that overlap with partisanship, those who said they planned to vote for a Democrat in their local congressional race generally didn’t favor Kavanaugh’s story over Ford’s, while those who planned to vote for a Republican said they did. (This is the “generic ballot” question.)

Those numbers were lower than the Fox poll’s measurement of support for Kavanaugh. That is probably in part because the Ford allegation may not have been well known for some part of the polling period — that dreaded effect mentioned at the outset of this article.

What’s telling about support for Kavanaugh, though, isn’t the expected partisan split. It’s that since August, support for Kavanaugh’s confirmation has dropped across the board. Overall, support fell five percentage points; among independents (a group for which there’s a high margin of error), it fell more than 10.

That is interesting to consider relative to recent polling from NBC and the Wall Street Journal, which found that since July opposition to Kavanaugh has increased, while support for him has mostly stayed flat.

And this, too, was before the most recent allegation reported by the New Yorker.

Fox News also asked about another aspect of the Ford allegations: Should the Senate vote as soon as possible on the Kavanaugh nomination, or should it wait and hold hearings to hear from both Ford and Kavanaugh? Most Americans said a delay was in order, and only just over half of Republicans and Trump voters agreed.

So that’s the pattern: Republicans support Kavanaugh more heavily, back him over Ford and think moving forward on a vote makes sense.

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But there’s a question that lingers beneath the surface on this. Extending the Kavanaugh confirmation fight closer to the midterm elections will probably have some effect on that voting, but it’s not clear what. Republicans clearly wanted to move his nomination forward as quickly as possible, but after the New Yorker story, there has been at least some suggestion that keeping his nomination alive closer to the election could be a boon for Republican electoral efforts.

Fox News’s polling, though, shows that Democrats and Republicans are about equally motivated to consider how a congressional candidate feels about Kavanaugh as important to their congressional vote. That is to say that a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans think that this is an important issue for deciding control of Congress.

The gap between Democrats and Republicans on that metric is only one percentage point. Compare that to another issue that’s central to 2018: health care.

Republicans were much more likely to say that health care is important to their congressional vote than that Kavanaugh is. There’s a 12-point gap between the parties on the importance of that issue.

In other words, health care is a more important issue to Republican voters than the Kavanaugh nomination — particularly relative to Democrats.

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One bright spot in the Fox polling? That men more than women said that a candidate’s position on Kavanaugh would be important to their congressional vote. Overall, women are far less supportive of Kavanaugh’s nomination than men.