Foley factor: According to National Journal’s PollTrack, recent polls seem to indicate the American public have a growing distrust and distaste for the GOP. To many, the Democrats are looking better — though the sentiment may be more like, “They may be ineffectual, but at least they ain’t creepy.”
The newest batch of polls following the week-old Mark Foley scandal confirms congressional Republicans’ worst fears: A majority of the country believes they chose to save their own political hides over the safety of young male pages.
Most respondents said their feelings about the president will impact their choices in the voting booth.Nearly two-thirds of ABC News/Washington Post respondents said Republican leaders tried to cover up the Florida Republican’s sexually tinged communications with pages after first learning of them more than a year ago. Fifty-four percent of Gallup/USA Today and 52 percent of CNN respondents smelled a GOP cover-up. And nearly eight in 10 Americans polled by CBS News/New York Times believe GOP leaders fretted more over protecting their political standing than the teenage pages.
Republicans have tried to ping cover-up talk back onto Democrats and the “liberal media,” but Americans aren’t giving the party a pass. Three-quarters of CNN respondents and a slim majority polled by CBS/Times said the Republican leadership improperly handled the situation.
The new polls indicate that Americans want House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., who knew of the inappropriate e-mails and whispers about Foley’s predilections for at least a year, to lose his post. More than half of CNN respondents said the Illinois Republican should step down; pluralities of 43 to 46 percent agreed in the four other polls.
But a new speaker of the House will do little to restore faith in the majority party, Gallup/USA Today pollsters found. A half-sample was just 4 percent more likely to vote Republican next month with Hastert out of the leadership mix.The Foley scandal doesn’t seem to be dissuading a dramatic number of voters still loyal to the Republicans, but it may cement negative ideas about the majority party. Respondents in all of today’s polls tended to credit Democrats with a better ethical track record than Republicans. And although that’s nothing new, recent respondents had more conviction about it: Gallup/USA Today tracked a 49/28 split favoring Democrats on the corruption issue, while a June survey handed the issue to the minority party 44/24 percent.
Party control is certainly on voters’ minds. Fifty-seven percent of respondents to a new Pew Research Center poll said the overall issue of party control will be a factor in their vote; four in 10 said it will not.
And another factor this cycle can’t be ignored: President Bush. Most respondents said their feelings about the president will impact their choices in the voting booth; more than double the number who said they viewed their choice as a vote for Bush (18 percent) said they viewed it as a vote against him (39 percent).
A similar NBC/WSJ question — with slightly different wording — showed a narrower margin. A 39-percent plurality said they intended their vote for Congress “to send signal of opposition to Bush,” while 28 percent said they wanted it to signal support for the president. About three in 10 said it wasn’t a signal either way.
Those respondents also said they’d prefer to see a Democrat-controlled Congress rather than a GOP-controlled one, 48 percent to 39 percent — the same as NBC/WSJ’s early September survey. Pew’s generic matchup showed Democrats 13 points ahead of Republicans, also statistically even with the group’s numbers from last month.
