Poll: About half think Hastert should resign

Story Highlights

• A CNN poll finds 75 percent say the GOP mishandled the Mark Foley matter
• The survey says 52 percent think House Speaker Dennis Hastert should resign
• Thirty-one percent believe Hastert should keep his post
• Congressional Republicans are viewed as less ethical than Democrats

Adjust font size:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- About half of Americans believe the scandal over former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley's contacts with teenage congressional pages should cost House Speaker Dennis Hastert his leadership post, according to a CNN poll released Monday.

The poll, conducted Friday through Sunday by Opinion Research Corp., found that 52 percent of the 1,028 adults interviewed think Hastert should step aside. Thirty-one percent said they think he should keep his post, and 17 percent had no opinion.

The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points. (View Americans' perceptions of Hastert, GOP ethics)

The poll also found that Americans are generally dissatisfied with how the GOP handled the Foley matter. Seventeen percent of those polled said it was handled appropriately, while 75 percent said Republicans took inappropriate steps. (Full poll results)

Fifty-two percent also said they believe the GOP leadership didn't investigate the charges earlier because they were deliberately covering the scandal up. Thirty-eight percent said they thought the leadership was unaware of how serious the allegations were.

Hastert, R-Illinois, has rejected calls by some influential conservatives to resign and said he intends to stand for the job again after November's midterm elections.

But he has acknowledged that his office was told in November 2005 about Foley's "overly friendly" e-mails to a 16-year-old boy who had served as a Capitol Hill messenger. Hastert said that led to a private rebuke for the six-term Florida congressman.

The speaker denies knowledge of sexually explicit instant messages, allegedly between Foley and teenage male pages, before their revelation by ABC News and other news organizations.

Foley abruptly resigned September 29 as the instant-message conversations emerged. Hastert has asked the FBI to investigate the matter and how it was handled by members of Congress, and the House Ethics Committee has launched an investigation.

The scandal also resulted in the resignation of Kirk Fordham, chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-New York. Fordham, who held the same job for Foley at one time, said after resigning that he warned Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, about Foley's behavior as early as 2003, according to The Associated Press and ABC News.

Palmer denies Fordham warned him about Foley. "What Kirk Fordham said did not happen," Palmer said.

Fordham expects to talk to House Ethics Committee members this week under oath, his lawyer said. The FBI also has interviewed Fordham.

Rep. Jim Kolbe's office received a complaint about then-Rep. Mark Foley's Internet exchanges with teen pages in 2000, resulting in "corrective action" against the lawmaker, a spokeswoman for the Arizona congressman said Monday.

Spokeswoman Korenna Cline said she didn't know what the "corrective action" entailed, but Kolbe's office thought the matter was resolved. (Read full story about Kolbe confronting Foley)

Also, former House Clerk Jeff Trandahl, who oversaw the page program, cited concerns about Foley's contacts with congressional pages long before Trandahl resigned from the post in 2005, sources told CNN on Monday.

Trandahl repeatedly raised red flags about Foley's behavior with pages years before Republican leaders confronted Foley about an e-mail he sent to a former page in 2005, sources familiar with the situation told CNN.

Attempts to reach Trandahl or his representatives for comment were unsuccessful.

In the wake of the scandal, 47 percent of those polled said they considered Republicans in Congress ethical -- down from 58 percent in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted in October 2005. Another 44 percent in the new survey said they considered most GOP lawmakers unethical.

Democrats scored higher, with 54 percent of those polled considering them ethical and 34 percent unethical. But those numbers also were down from 2005, when 63 percent of people polled considered Democrats in Congress ethical.

Other findings in Monday's poll:

• President Bush's approval rating is 39 percent. The survey question has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

• The approval rating for Congress as a whole is 28 percent. The question has a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

• Fifty-eight percent of likely voters say they plan to vote for Democrats in November, compared with 37 percent who say they'll vote GOP. The 21-point gap is five points wider than it was in a CNN poll conducted last week. Among registered voters, the gap is narrower, as 54 percent said they plan to vote for Democrats and 38 percent say they're casting ballots for Republicans. The question has a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

• Asked if they were enthusiastic about voting this year, 51 percent of Democrats said yes, compared with 44 percent of Republicans. The question has a sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

• Those who say most members of Congress deserve to be re-elected dipped from 42 percent last week to 34 percent this week. The number of people who say their own representative deserved another term also dropped, from 57 percent last week to 52 percent this week. The question has a sampling error of 4.5 percentage points.