Fox poll: 54% want independent investigation into Sestak, Romanoff job offers

Fox News published a poll of registered voters over the weekend on the controversy surrounding White House attempts to lure Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff out of mounting primary challenges to incumbent Democrats — and the results don’t show much promise for Republicans hoping to make it an issue in the midterms.  A majority of 54% want an investigation into the Obama administration’s actions, but almost two-thirds consider it business as usual.  Only 12% believe anything illegal actually occurred:

Twelve percent of voters think the Obama administration broke the law when it talked jobs with the candidates, while another 40 percent think the administration did do something unethical, but not illegal. Thirty percent think it didn’t do anything seriously wrong.

A 54 percent majority thinks the inconsistent explanations given by the candidates and the White House suggest someone is covering something up, rather than that people are simply remembering events differently (28 percent).

Most — 65 percent — think discussing jobs in exchange for not running for office is a long-standing, common practice in past administrations, while 21 percent disagree.

Even so, by a 54-35 percent margin, voters think there should be an investigation into the Obama administration’s actions to see if anything inappropriate took place.

With most media polls, I start with the sample, which in this case is a mess.  It’s not so much that it gives Democrats an eight-point edge in the sample, but that all of the allocations seem way off thanks to serious under-representation of independents.  They only make up 19.6% of the 843-voter sample, or just slightly more than half of what most party-identification find in the electorate.  Republicans then get oversampled slightly at 36.2%, while Democrats make up almost half of the sample at 44.3%.  With that kind of sample split, any close results should be entirely disregarded.

Of course, there aren’t a lot of close results anyway.  The 19-point spread for investigations would likely be larger if the poll sample was more representative of the actual partisan profile of the electorate.  The two-thirds result for the business-as-usual explanation would presumably drop a bit, but it would narrow a 44-point gap by at most 10-12 points.  The splits by affiliation show that:

Even among Republicans and independents, there isn’t a great deal of support for the idea that criminal activity took place, although pluralities support the idea that the Obama administration acted unethically.  That leads to the demand for investigations, with 58% of independents backing a probe, but with little expectation of success, apparently.

Besides, Obama is not running for re-election in this cycle. This may hurt him more in 2012 than it will hurt Democrats in Congress in 2010, especially since Sestak and Romanoff told the White House to pound sand in the end.  Unless another example arises in which the White House had more success, the political impact of this seems to be limited.

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