The slight majority of Americans that say Thomas should recuse himself includes 79% of Democrats, 53% of independents and 28% of Republicans.
Overall, 39% say Thomas should not recuse himself, with 9% unsure.
Respondents to the survey were told that “it’s been reported that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, communicated with former President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, urging him to pursue efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.”
The results underscore recent criticism of Thomas from progressives and some legal ethics experts who see his wife’s political activism as a potential conflict of interest for Thomas’ work on some Supreme Court cases.
In the messages reviewed by CNN, Ginni Thomas was getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress of the attempt to find a path to overturn the results.
On November 24, 2020 she wrote: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences… the whole coup and now this… we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.”
Ginni Thomas previously revealed that she attended the pro-Trump rally that preceded the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, but says she “played no role” in planning the events of that day.
The poll results show that 47% think that Ginni Thomas’ political activity poses an ethical problem for her husband. In a mostly party-line split, 75% of Democrats call it an ethical problem, while 61% of Republicans say it is not one.
It is up to individual justices to decide whether a case poses a potential conflict that, under the law, requires their recusal.
For Wednesday’s poll results, Quinnipiac surveyed 1,436 U.S. adults nationwide from March 31 through April 4 via telephone. The results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
