More than three-quarters of voters in New York’s 3rd Congressional District say sketchy Rep. George Santos should step down, according to a new poll.
The survey from Newsday and Siena College found that 83% of Santos’ constituents view him unfavorably, including 78% of Republicans.
A total of 78% of voters in the Nassau County and Queens district want the 34-year-old GOP lawmaker to resign, including 89% of Democrats, 72% of independents and 71% of Republicans. Just 13% say Santos should stay on, while 9% said they didn’t know or had no opinion.
Additionally, three-quarters of voters feel Santos cannot be an effective representative of the people who put him into office, while only 16% believe that he can be.
“NY-3 voters overwhelmingly and unambiguously say Rep. Santos should resign. Whether you look it at by party, gender, race, age, religion, income, or which county the voters live in, the answer is the same: resign,” Siena College Poll director Don Levy said.
“Similarly, voters of every party and every demographic breakdown know who Santos is, are following the news about Santos, and view Santos unfavorably.”
By a margin of more than two-to-one (63% to 31%), respondents who backed Santos over Democrat Robert Zimmerman in November say they would not have voted for him if they had known about the congressman’s many confirmed fabrications related to his life story.
The poll also found that 71% of district voters said it was wrong for the House GOP Steering Committee, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), to seat Santos on the chamber’s Science, Space and Technology Committee and Small Business Committee — even after Santos admitted to The Post last month that he lied about receiving a MBA from New York University and working for top investment firms Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.
Santos recently declared that he wouldn’t resign until the 142,000 people who elected him tell him to walk away, and said he still plans to run for re-election in 2024.
“I was elected by 142,000 people — until those same 142,000 people tell me they don’t want me … we’ll find out in two years,” he said, with McCarthy later backing him, saying: “You know why I’m standing by him? Because his constituents voted for him.”
Last week, a Siena poll found that 59% of voters statewide want Santos to resign and 56% view him unfavorably.
“Those numbers were even higher in the downstate suburbs,” Levy said, noting that the poll this week echoes those numbers but also shows huge bipartisan margins “rarely seen in today’s divided political climate.”
The poll out Tuesday also found that 77% of NY-3 voters believe Santos’ rise is a sign that “our political system is broken” while just 12% called his elevation to the House of Representatives a “one-of-a-kind event.”
