I don't think its all that likely the vote would be held before the election. The election is only 44 days away, and the shortest confirmation (RGB herself) was 50 days long from nomination, and nobodies been nominated yet
The most likely scenario is that the confirmation hearings are held during the election and the vote afterwards

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-court-ginsburg-poll-idUKKCN26B0TS

That's pretty interesting, I didn't think the spread would be so high. 62% want Ginsberg's seat to be filled by the winner of the 2020 election whereas 23% don't. The rest don't care.

Based on this, I think the best course of action is for the GOP to confirm a nominee during the lame duck period.

All that shows is the incredible bias of polling, mostly due to how you phrase the question

Why do you say that?

because the "winner of the 2020 election" is a different person to different people. ie, its still trump according to some. so while when you phrase it like that, it sounds like most people want to wait, it doesnt necessarily mean that, they just want trump to fill the seat, whether now or later.

seems like a pretty basic thing in human conversations. If you ask them a question like "Should the supreme court seat be picked by the winner of the presidential election", even a question that might seem prima facie neutral, its still going to instinctively pose the two sides as 'winners' and 'losers', it casts saying 'no' as anti-democratic, it wouldn't acknowledge the legal authority or distinguish between rushing an nominee before the election or holding hearings during the lengthy interim before inauguration. It flies up against the human recency bias to ask them to judge an action in an uncertain future. It would presuppose the point being made and make saying no an argumentative denial.
I tried to google the Reuters data to see exactly how they phrased it, but they didn't post their pdfs so we can only speculate
but I'd find it very hard to come up with a way to ask such a question without skewing the answers by large amount, so I doubt they did

The shortest confirmation was 19 days in 1970. Not disagreeing or opining in any way on what you're saying, merely correcting factually inaccurate information.

Further, there's still 4 months in the current administration. Plenty of time.

Edit: Correction: It was 1969, not 1970, and it was 17 days, not 19. My bad, my memory is shit, especially for historical events I didn't live through. :/

Edit 2: Looks like even I'm fake news. Abe Fortas was appointed by Johnson on July 28th, 1965, and confirmed on August 11th, 1965. My math sucks, but I'm pretty sure that's 14 days.

Either way, the point stands. You can go through the historical record of nominations vs confirmations yourself, but 50 days is nowhere near the fastest.

Edit 3: Byron White under JFK took 8 days.

No matter what I'm looking at here, the idea that it's supposed to take months is not precedented.

Edit 4: Just to drive the point home, nearly every nomination by George Washington was confirmed within 1 day.

This post was edited by InsaneBobb on Sep 21 2020 03:51am

There's no electoral college in polls

ye that

The underlying issue is whether or not we should fill the vacancy this close to the election. You can easily phrase that without sounding biased: "Given that the election is weeks away, should the SCOTUS vacancy be filled after inauguration day?"

Here is the pdf: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2020-09/topline-reuters-rbg-supreme-court-vacancy-092120.pdf

Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?...President Donald Trump should nominate a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg before his term ends.

Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?...The winner of the election should be able to appoint Ruth Bader Ginsburg's replacement on the Supreme Court.

The numbers I referenced refer to the 2nd question and there's actually a substantial gap between the two questions.

This post was edited by thundercock on Sep 21 2020 01:20pm