Three polls show the GOP is reeling from the scandal involving resigned Rep. Mark Foley, his salacious emails to underage teen pages, and the House and party elites’ handling of it.
The question: how will these poll numbers change as other stories begin to dominate the news cycles — for instance, not irrelevant items such as North Korea’s nuclear test.
But it’s hard to imagine there will be a massive, sudden rebound from poll numbers like these that suggest the bulk of the (non-lockstep) American public is quickly making up its mind:
A Capitol Hill sex scandal has reinforced public doubts about Republican leadership and pushed Democrats to a huge lead in the race for control of Congress four weeks before Election Day, the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows.
Democrats had a 23-point lead over Republicans in every group of people questioned — likely voters, registered voters and adults — on which party’s House candidate would get their vote. That’s double the lead Republicans had a month before they seized control of Congress in 1994 and the Democrats’ largest advantage among registered voters since 1978.
Nearly three in 10 registered voters said their representative doesn’t deserve re-election — the highest level since 1994. President Bush’s approval rating was 37% in the new poll, down from 44% in a Sept. 15-17 poll. And for the first time since the question was asked in 2002, Democrats did better than Republicans on who would best handle terrorism, 46%-41%.
“It’s hard to see how the climate is going to shift dramatically between now and Election Day,” said John Pitney, a former GOP aide on Capitol Hill who now teaches at Claremont-McKenna College in California. He said Iraq remains the biggest problem for Republicans: “People just don’t like inconclusive wars.”
The New York Times finds that the Foley scandal has battered the GOP’s image:
Americans say that Republican Congressional leaders put their political interests ahead of protecting the safety of teenage pages, and that House leaders knew of former Representative Mark Foley’s sexually charged messages to pages well before he was forced to quit Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll, completed before North Korea announced early today that it had detonated a nuclear test explosion, also found that the war in Iraq continues to take a toll on President Bush and the Republican Party, and that the White House is having difficulty retaining its edge in handling terrorism.
The number of Americans who approve of Mr. Bush’s handling of the campaign terrorism dropped to 46 percent from 54 percent over the past two weeks, suggesting that the president had failed to gain any political lift from an orchestrated set of ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In addition, the poll shows that Americans are now evenly divided over which party they think can better handle terrorism, marking the first time that Democrats have matched Republicans on national security, despite a concerted White House effort to seize the advantage on the issue this month.
With four weeks left before Election Day, the poll indicates that the scandal involving Mr. Foley, a former congressman from south Florida, is alienating Americans from Congress and weakening a Republican Party that was already struggling to keep control of the House and Senate. By overwhelming numbers, including majorities of Republicans, Americans said that most members of Congress do not follow the same rules of behavior as average Americans, and that most members of Congress consider themselves above the law.
And what about House Speaker Dennis Hastert? President George Bush and White House spokesman Tony “Naughty Emails” Snow will reportedly appear at a fundraiser for Hastert. Do most Americans also feel Hastert is getting a bum rap? Welllllll:
About half of Americans believe the scandal over former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley’s contacts with teenage congressional pages should cost House Speaker Dennis Hastert his leadership post, according to a CNN poll released Monday.
The poll, conducted Friday through Sunday by Opinion Research Corp., found that 52 percent of the 1,028 adults interviewed think Hastert should step aside. Thirty-one percent said they think he should keep his post, and 17 percent had no opinion.
The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The poll also found that Americans are generally dissatisfied with how the GOP handled the Foley matter. Seventeen percent of those polled said it was handled appropriately, while 75 percent said Republicans took inappropriate steps.
Fifty-two percent also said they believe the GOP leadership didn’t investigate the charges earlier because they were deliberately covering the scandal up. Thirty-eight percent said they thought the leadership was unaware of how serious the allegations were.
And what does the GOP think this will mean in cold, hard political numbers? And how will the GOP combat it?
The Washington Post reports that the GOP is bracing itself for losses and GOPers are going to leave it to their party leadership to claim it’s a controversy because the Democrats are making it one — a fact that does not seem to be confirmed by the above poll numbers which show a more profound across-the-boards national outrage:
Republican campaign officials said yesterday that they expect to lose at least seven House seats and as many as 30 in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, as a result of sustained violence in Iraq and the page scandal involving former GOP representative Mark Foley.
Democrats need to pick up 15 seats in the election to take back control of the House after more than a decade of GOP leadership. Two weeks of virtually nonstop controversy over President Bush’s war policy and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s handling of the page scandal have forced party leaders to recalculate their vulnerability and placed a growing number of Republican incumbents and open seats at much greater risk.
GOP officials are urging lawmakers to focus exclusively on local issues and leave it to party leaders to mitigate the Foley controversy by accusing Democrats of trying to politicize it.
And the White House is going to play the terrorism “fear card,” the Post reports:
At the same time, the White House plans to amplify national security issues, especially the threat of terrorism, after North Korea’s reported nuclear test, in hopes of shifting the debate away from casualties and controversy during the final month of the campaign. These efforts are aimed largely at prodding disaffected conservatives to vote for GOP candidates despite their unease.
But there could be one hitch:
Still, GOP leaders privately said that Democrats are edging much closer to locking down a majority of House seats because a small but significant number of conservatives are frustrated with Republican governance, while independent swing voters are turning against GOP candidates.
We have noted repeatedly on this site (a) the gradual but steady flight of independent voters from the GOP; (b) the fact that the GOP did NOT win its elections only by getting votes from its base but also by getting votes from Democrats who didn’t trust or like their own party on some issues and from independent voters; and (c) the alienation of traditional Barry Goldwater-descended voters from the GOP fold. Many independent voters, Democrats who once voted for the GOP and traditional conservatives are clearly concluding it’s time to clean house.
WILD CARD: How will the North Korea crisis impact the election? Will North Korea’s nuclear test help Bush (loyalists already are saying it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault; it’s displacing some of the domestic scandal stories) or hurt him (the administration’s non-talking policy towards North Korea has been under fire for months and some view the test as a symptom of Bush administration policy failure)? How will the administration respond? And what kind of impact will the test and the administration’s evolving stance to it have on election day?
But if you read these polls, they suggest that it’s going to take much more than statements from the White House on a foreign policy issue or a crisis covered in a news cycle to repair the damage.
Many voters clearly have questions about the White House, GOP’s and House leadership’s competency, judgment and credibility. That’s toothpaste that’s hard to get back into the tube.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.