During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump released two lists of his potential Supreme Court nominees. (Brett Kavanaugh, interestingly, wasn’t on either one.) John McGinnis asks why the Democratic presidential candidates haven’t made similar announcements. To my mind, he leaves off an important reason: Democratic voters don’t feel as burned by past Democratic presidents’ Supreme Court appointees as Republican voters do, and so there’s less demand for Democratic candidates to establish that their nominees would work out the way Democratic voters would like. And there’s a reason behind that reason: Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court have been more reliable votes for Democratic priorities than Republican appointees have been for Republican ones.
Additionally, none of the Democratic candidates faces the kind of skepticism about their basic loyalty to the party’s tenets that Trump did in early 2016.