How Conservative Is Brett Kavanaugh?
The Court’s center of gravity, measured: every vote since 2018, the closest pairing on the bench, and the 13 times he left the bloc — mostly to win.
Conservative, and almost never on the losing side. Kavanaugh’s record is 40.7% liberal against 48.9% for the colleagues who heard the same cases — but the number that describes him is a different one: he is outside the majority in 6.2% of his votes where they are outside it 19.4% of the time, the largest such gap on the Court. His 13 departures from the conservative bloc are not defections at all. 10 of them put him in a winning coalition, and 11 of the 13 have the Chief Justice standing beside him. When Kavanaugh leaves the six, he usually takes Roberts and the three liberals and makes five.
The record, against every justice since 1946
The Supreme Court Database codes each vote liberal or conservative, issue by issue, under definitions explained here. Kavanaugh’s share is 40.7% liberal across 413 coded votes since 2018 — 8.2 points below the same-case baseline, and, as it happens, the identical career share to Gorsuch, whose page reads nothing like this one. He sits under the 500-vote bar the site’s career rankings require, so no rank is printed for him yet. Over the 2020 through 2024 terms his 40.3% is fourth-lowest on the bench, above Barrett and below Gorsuch and the Chief Justice — the middle of the conservative six rather than either edge of it.
The subject bars say the same thing quietly: 40.0% liberal in criminal procedure against a 50.7% baseline and 37.0% in civil rights against 52.6% — conservative margins, but roughly half the distance from the baseline that Thomas and Alito post in the same areas. Nothing in the record is extreme. What is unusual is where it leaves him standing.
Where he sits on the current Court
Agreement in divided cases, the 2020 through 2024 terms — how often each colleague was on Kavanaugh’s side of the judgment when the Court split:
Two figures on this chart are the highest of their kind measured anywhere on these pages. The top is 92.1% with the Chief Justice — the closest any two justices come, ahead of Sotomayor and Kagan at 86.4% and Thomas and Alito at 79.5%. The bottom is 44.1% with Sotomayor, and it is the floor that matters: every other justice profiled here has a colleague in the twenties or low thirties, and Kavanaugh agrees with his least frequent ally more often than Thomas, Jackson, Alito or Sotomayor agree with theirs. Gorsuch’s chart is flat because nobody is near him. Kavanaugh’s is high because everybody is.
When he breaks from the bloc
Same test as the other conservative pages: a divided case in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and Kavanaugh voted the other way. It happened 13 times in 120 such cases across the 2020 through 2024 terms — 10.8%, in the middle of the six profiled so far, between Kagan’s 10.1% and Alito’s 11.8%.
And then the word stops fitting. On every other page a break is a dissent — Alito’s are all dissents, Thomas’s are usually alone. Here, 10 of the 13 are majorities: 8 where he simply joined the winning side and 2 where he joined it and wrote separately. Only 3 are dissents. The database codes 9 of the 13 liberal against 3 conservative, which is the arithmetic of the same fact: when the bloc holds without him, it is usually because he has gone to build a different majority.
The Chief Justice’s fifth vote
11 of the 13 have Roberts beside him, and ten of them share one shape: the Chief Justice and Kavanaugh joining the three liberals to make five. That coalition upheld an Alabama Voting Rights Act claim (Allen v. Milligan, where he wrote to say Alabama was really asking the Court to overrule a thirty-seven-year-old framework Congress has left alone), let a veteran sue the state that would not take him back (Torres), let a death-row prisoner challenge his execution method in an ordinary civil suit (Nance), reopened a federal claim an Arizona rule had shut (Cruz), and left the healthcare-worker vaccination rule standing (Biden v. Missouri). In Williams v. Reed he wrote the opinion himself: a state cannot use its own exhaustion rule to bar a federal claim when the complaint is that the process is being delayed.
Outside measures found the same pattern from the other end. One recent study of who supplies cross-bloc majorities concluded that seven of Kavanaugh’s eight pivotal appearances included the Chief Justice — which is this list, arrived at independently. It is also why “swing vote” misdescribes him: a swing justice chooses between two coalitions, and this one moves with a particular colleague.
The three dissents
The exceptions are worth their own paragraph because there are so few of them. In Harrington v. Purdue Pharma he wrote for himself, the Chief Justice, Sotomayor and Kagan, arguing the settlement was the best outcome available to the victims — a dissent whose company crosses the Court entirely. In Erlinger he dissented with Alito on the jury-trial question, joined in part by Jackson. And in Laboratory Corp. v. Davis he dissented alone from a dismissal, saying he would have reached the merits and held that a damages class cannot include members who were never injured — the only time in seven terms he has stood by himself.
The concurrer
Of 432 recorded votes, 27 were dissents and 52 came with a concurrence of his own. That ratio is the method: the vote goes with the majority and the qualification is filed separately — which is how a justice who is almost never in dissent still shapes what a decision means. His concurrence in Ramos set out the three questions he asks before overruling a precedent, beginning with whether it is “grievously or egregiously wrong”; his Dobbs concurrence rested on the claim that “the Constitution is neutral” on abortion and leaves it to the democratic process; his Biden v. Texas concurrence told the executive branch what the statutes did and did not require of it next.
The umpire he described at his confirmation — “a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no litigant or policy” — is a contested self-portrait, as it would be for anyone on this Court. What the record shows without contest is a justice who is in the majority at 93.8% and writes his reservations from inside it.
The 13 breaks, case by case
Every case from the 2020 through 2024 terms in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and Kavanaugh did not, oldest first.
Joined Sotomayor’s majority, with the Chief Justice and the liberals: the Railroad Retirement Board’s refusal to reopen a benefits decision is itself a final decision, and so can be taken to court.
Joined Kagan’s majority, same coalition: an inventor who sold a patent can still be estopped from attacking it — but only where he is contradicting what he represented when he sold it.
Joined the per curiam letting the healthcare-worker vaccination rule take effect — the same five, the same week the Court blocked the larger workplace mandate.
Joined Breyer’s majority: by ratifying the Constitution the states gave up immunity to Congress’s power to raise armies, so a veteran may sue a state that would not take him back.
Joined Kagan’s majority: a condemned man may use an ordinary civil-rights suit to challenge his execution method, even when the alternative he proposes his state has not authorized.
Joined the Chief Justice’s majority and wrote alone besides: when detention space runs out the statutes leave the executive a real choice, and choosing is policy, not law.
Joined the Chief Justice’s majority upholding the Voting Rights Act claim, all but one part, and wrote to say why: Alabama was asking the Court to overrule a thirty-seven-year-old framework Congress has left standing.
Joined Sotomayor’s majority: an Arizona rule read for the first time to exclude this prisoner’s claim was too novel to count as an adequate state ground, so the federal courts could hear him.
Wrote the dissent — joined by the Chief Justice, Sotomayor and Kagan — arguing the plan was the best available outcome for the victims and that the Court had misread the Code’s catch-all.
Joined Jackson’s majority: two states cannot settle the Rio Grande compact between themselves over the objection of the United States, which has claims of its own.
Wrote the dissent (joined by Alito, and by Jackson in part): judges have long found the facts of prior convictions, and the occasions inquiry is one of them.
Wrote the majority himself, with the Chief Justice and the liberals: a state cannot use its own exhaustion rule to bar the federal claim when the complaint is that the process itself is being delayed.
His only solo dissent in seven terms: he would have decided the case and held that a damages class cannot include members who were never injured at all.
Questions
Is Brett Kavanaugh a swing vote?
Not in the Kennedy sense, and the data says why. He sits in a three-justice cluster at the Court's center with Barrett and the Chief Justice on the Martin–Quinn measure — but where a swing justice moves between two coalitions, Kavanaugh moves with one man: 11 of his 13 departures from the conservative bloc have the Chief Justice beside him. He is less the Court's pivot than the Chief's most reliable partner when the Chief needs a fifth.
How often is Kavanaugh in the majority?
More than almost anyone, in almost every term. Across his whole record he has been outside the majority in only 6.2% of his determinate votes, against 19.4% for the colleagues sitting on the same cases — a 13.2-point gap, the largest on the Court in that direction. SCOTUSblog's term counts tell the same story: 97% of all cases in the 2020 term, 95% in 2021 and 96% in 2022, at or near the top of the bench each year.
How often does Kavanaugh agree with Chief Justice Roberts?
In 92.1% of divided cases across the 2020 through 2024 terms — the highest figure between any two justices measured on any of these pages, above even Sotomayor and Kagan at 86.4%. They were the Court's most-aligned pair in each term from 2019 through 2022; Thomas and Alito have since traded that title back and forth with the liberal pairs.
Does Kavanaugh ever break with the conservative justices?
13 times in 120 chances (10.8%) — but “break” describes it badly. 10 of the 13 put him in the winning coalition rather than in dissent: 5–4 majorities in which he and the Chief Justice joined the three liberals, on the Voting Rights Act (Allen v. Milligan), a veteran's right to sue his state (Torres), a death-row prisoner's method-of-execution claim (Nance), and the vaccination rule for healthcare workers (Biden v. Missouri). He does not defect. He decides which coalition wins.
Does Kavanaugh write dissents?
Rarely — 27 in 432 recorded votes, against 52 separate concurrences. He is the Court's great concurrer: the vote is with the majority and the qualification is his own, from the stare decisis framework in Ramos (“grievously or egregiously wrong”) to the Dobbs concurrence insisting “the Constitution is neutral” on abortion. In seven terms he has dissented alone exactly once, in Laboratory Corp. v. Davis.
How this page is made
Every count comes from the Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.), justice-centered, 2025 Release 01 (how the voting figures are made). Window, bloc and break definition are as on the other conservative pages; every case links to its opinion. One coding note: the database records no ideological direction for Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, so that case sits in the count of breaks but not in the liberal-conservative split above.
Outside figures, with their disagreements shown rather than smoothed: the Martin–Quinn cluster at the Court’s center is Adam Feldman’s (Legalytics, 2026), and by that measure Barrett, not Kavanaugh, sits closest to the median — the three of them, with the Chief Justice, are within a tenth of a unit of each other. SCOTUSblog called him the “median justice” in 2021 and the Court’s median justices, with Roberts, in 2022; Feldman’s later work argues the swing-justice frame does not fit this Court at all, and it is his finding about the Chief Justice that the break list above independently reproduces. Term-by-term majority rates and the Roberts pairing are from the SCOTUSblog stat packs and Empirical SCOTUS reviews. Quotations: his 2018 confirmation opening statement, and his concurrences in Ramos v. Louisiana and Dobbs. Case notes were checked against the slip opinions at supremecourt.gov.