Polls see slide in GOP support

WASHINGTON — Three independent polls released Monday demonstrated the political damage that congressional Republicans, and particularly House Speaker Dennis Hastert, have sustained since a GOP congressman's sexually explicit electronic messages to underage pages were disclosed late last month.

About half of Americans polled say Hastert, R-Ill., should resign his leadership post.

Even among Republicans, more than a third believe the speaker should go, according to the CNN-Gallup poll, conducted over the weekend.

Two of the polls, those by CNN-Gallup and ABC News-Washington Post, showed that between 52 and 64 percent of those surveyed believe party leaders deliberately tried to cover up the actions of Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., who resigned last month.

And three-quarters of those polled consider Republican leaders' handling of the matter inappropriate, CNN-Gallup said.

While voters say such issues as the Iraq war, terrorism and the economy are more important to them than the handling of Foley's lurid electronic messages, polls show a sharp drop in public support for Republican congressional candidates.

Among likely voters, 58 percent say they plan to vote for Democrats in November, versus 37 percent who say they will vote Republican, according to the CNN-Gallup poll.

The 21 percentage point margin is 5 points wider than it was a week earlier in the same poll.

The ABC-Post poll found registered voters favor Democratic over Republican candidates 54 percent to 41 percent. The 13-point margin also is 5 points wider than in the last ABC-Post poll, taken a month earlier.

According to a CBS-New York Times poll, four of five Americans polled think Republican leaders are more concerned with politics than the well-being of underage pages.

All three surveys were completed before The Washington Post reported on Monday that Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., had confronted Foley over inappropriate behavior toward pages in 2000, extending to at least six years the time period in which other members of Foley's party were aware of suspicious activity.

Kolbe was a member of the House Page Board at the time, though it was unclear whether he informed other members.

On Monday, the House ethics committee sent a letter to all congressional offices asking them to contact former pages and request that they report any inappropriate messages or contacts by Foley or other members of Congress.

National poll results are of limited use in forecasting the outcome of midterm elections, in which control of the House and the Senate will be determined by the results of a relatively small number of individual elections.

Still, such a dramatic shift in national sentiments is a striking illustration of a changing political mood that could reverberate in the election Nov. 7.

GOP campaign officials said Monday 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.

Democrats need to pick up 15 seats to regain control of the House after more than a decade of GOP leadership.

GOP officials are urging lawmakers to focus exclusively on local issues and leave it to party leaders to mitigate the Foley scandal by accusing Democrats of trying to politicize it.

Still, GOP leaders privately said 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.

"If you are Democrat, you have to like the atmosphere," said Rep. Thomas Davis of Virginia, a top campaign strategist for the GOP.