Chris Bowers raised a good point late yesterday when he noted that there seemed to be a dearth of polls in the wake of the [tag]Mark Foley[/tag] sex scandal. With a scandal like this dominating the political discourse, shouldn’t there have been several [tag]poll[/tag]s released over the last week? The story about Foley’s emails broke on Thursday, within 24 hours we learned of the IMs and Foley’s resignation, and by Monday, the GOP was in turmoil. Where are all the polls?
Today, we got our first hint as to how the electorate is responding to all of this. If you’re a Republican, it’s not good news.
Congressional Republicans, already struggling against negative public perceptions of Congress, now face voters who say new scandals will significantly influence their vote in November.
With midterm elections less than five weeks away, the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that about half of likely voters say recent disclosures of corruption and scandal in Congress will be very or extremely important when they cast their vote next month.
The poll was conducted this week as House Republican leaders came under increasing pressure to explain what they knew of sexually explicit messages from former Rep. Mark Foley of Florida to teenage pages.
Specifically, the poll shows that, by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, voters believe Dems would be better at combating political corruption than Republicans. For months, that hasn’t mattered too much — voters ranked the issue near the bottom of their concerns — but all of a sudden, with the public disgusted with what they’re hearing out of Washington, a gap like this could have a serious impact.
Speaking of the new AP poll, the news wasn’t much better for the Republicans at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The poll also found that President Bush’s efforts to depict the war in Iraq as part of a larger campaign against terrorism and to portray Democrats as weak on national security was not altering the political landscape.
Approval of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq was at 37 percent among likely voters, down slightly from 41 percent last month. Bush’s rating on handling foreign policy and terrorism also fell slightly, from 47 percent last month to 43 percent this month. […]
Overall, the president’s and Congress’ low approval ratings were essentially unchanged from last month. Among likely voters, 24 percent approved of the way Congress was handling its job and 39 percent approved of Bush’s job performance.
To make a long story short, it’s not a good time to be a Republican incumbent.