A Washington Post/ABC News poll was released yesterday, the first major poll done on the Plame Game. The public appears to believe that this is not just a harmless incident.
Over 80 percent of those polled considered the scandal a “serious” problem (48 percent said “very serious” while 34 percent said “somewhat serious”). Nearly 70 percent said they’d prefer a special prosecutor outside Ashcroft’s Justice Department be named to investigate the controversy, a move that the administration and congressional Republicans are strongly opposing.
Unfortunately, the public hasn’t exactly been glued to the news since the story broke last week. One-third of poll respondents said they hadn’t “heard of read anything” about the situation. The poll was conducted on Tuesday, Sept. 30.
(If 81 percent believe it’s serious, but only 68 percent are familiar with the controversy, aren’t there quite a few people who arrived at their conclusions without a strong base of information? Apparently, yes.)
One other encouraging sign was the seriousness with which self-identified Republicans saw the controversy. While GOP partisans in the media have resorted to impressive rhetorical acrobatics to dismiss the scandal, Republicans in this nationwide poll largely agreed with the rest of the public. 72 percent of Republicans agreed that this is a serious matter, and surprisingly enough, 52 percent of Republicans believed a special counsel should be named to investigate the matter.