In April, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) resurrected an old slogan from 2006, attacking Republicans’ “culture of cronyism, corruption, and incompetence.” A new poll in battleground congressional districts suggests that message is taking hold.
The left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund surveyed 48 Republican-held congressional districts, and found a majority of voters (54 percent) said Republicans are “more corrupt” than Democrats. Even so, another 46 percent said Democrats were “more corrupt.”
Worse for Republicans, however, a whopping 60 percent of independents held Republicans responsible for the corruption, POLITICO reported.
While the poll may reveal weaknesses for Democrats as well, CAP did not reveal the full results of the poll, giving the anti-Republican results to POLITICO. The liberal group surveyed 1,200 registered voters online between July 2 and July 5.
According to the poll, voters had a high-level of familiarity with Trump’s cabinet and showed frustration when asked about officials spending “taxpayer money on perks for themselves” or when they “make policies that help their big campaign donors.”
A majority of voters (56 percent), and slightly more independents (57 percent), told CAP that congressional Republicans are not doing enough oversight of the Trump administration.
A full three-quarters of voters (75 percent) said it was “serious” or “very serious” that 53 Republicans in Congress would “get an average tax cut of over $200,000 each from a single loophole they added to the tax bill at the last minute.”
Ironically, nearly as many Democrats as Republicans benefitted from the pass-through business provision in the tax bill, which CAP’s Action Fund vociferously attacked in an April report.
While the wealthy have also benefitted from the tax reform bill, more than 3 million Americans have received bonuses as a result of it. Even so, Pelosi and other Democrats continue to attack these benefits as “crumbs.”
The more serious corruption weakness comes from Trump’s cabinet. Both former Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned facing corruption scandals.
Even so, these scandals still pale in comparison to the 2006 Republican scandals involving Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and Mark Foley.
Jesse Lee, a CAP spokesman, noted that the poll showed a 4-point Democratic lead on the generic ballot for these congressional districts, areas where Republicans led by an average of 14 points in the last two campaign cycles. Democrats still have a sizable lead in the nationwide generic ballot.
“The fact that you have these recurring Cabinet scandals, the fact that it keeps happening over and over again, it registers,” Lee told POLITICO. “People understand it’s been taken to a new level. There’s no check on it anymore. Trump isn’t pushing back on Congress to keep it under control. Congress isn’t pushing back on Trump.”
Has it been taken to a new level? Never mind the corruption under Obama — how the former president enriched his best friend by attacking industry after industry. Never mind the IRS targeting scandal, Benghazi, Solyndra, and other big government scandals the former president unleashed due to his big government ideology.
How quickly voters forget. Then again, this is a liberal poll from a liberal activist group.
Democrats hoping for a “blue wave” in 2018 were never going to see that happen in the U.S. Senate, but polls like this one give them hope for taking the House of Representatives. Republicans need to turn out, and in force, to prevent the socialism-lite (and sometimes socialism-heavy) the Democratic Party is selling.
The worst examples of Republican corruption — Tom Price and Scott Pruitt — are no longer in office, and the tax reform bill is not corrupt in the way Democrats are claiming. But Republicans still need to make their case, and forcefully. America needs to reject the big government coming from the other party, because that ideology actually entrenches more corruption by its very nature.
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