# To Kavanaugh or Not to Kavanaugh: That is the Polarizing Question

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.06687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Fine-Grained Prediction of Political Leaning on Social Media with Unsupervised Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12382/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

On October 6, 2018, the US Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh with the narrowest margin for a successful confirmation since 1881 and where the senators voted overwhelmingly along party lines. In this paper, we examine whether the political polarization in the Senate is reflected among the general public. To do so, we analyze the views of more than 128 thousand Twitter users. We show that users supporting or opposing Kavanaugh's nomination were generally using divergent hashtags, retweeting different Twitter accounts, and sharing links from different websites. We also examine characterestics of both groups.