Poll: Forty-two percent say Grassley should be re-elected

Editor’s Note: This post refers to a Research 2000 poll. A report shows that Research 2000 fabricated a substantial amount of its polling on State of the Nation polls; however, The Iowa Independent no longer has confidence in any of the polling done by the firm.

Less than half of Iowans say U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, should be re-elected to a sixth term, according to a survey conducted by the polling firm Research 2000.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa (Lauren Victoria Burke/wdcpix.com)

The poll, released Monday morning to The Iowa Independent, was commissioned by a coalition of three liberal organizations — Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America and Credo Action.

When asked “Do you think Chuck Grassley should be re-elected to another 6 years in the Senate, or is it time for someone new to represent Iowa,” only 42 percent said he should be re-elected, 31 percent said someone new should represent Iowa and 27 percent said they were not sure. Predictably, 81 percent of Republicans surveyed said Grassley deserves another term, compared to only 12 percent of Democrats.

Grassley received his highest approvals numbers in western Iowa’s 5th Congressional District, where 65 percent said he should be re-elected. That number falls to 43 percent in the 4th District, 41 percent in the 3rd Disrict, 29 percent in the 2nd District and 32 percent in the 1st District.

Only 16 percent of Iowans surveyed who said they voted for President Barack Obama believe Grassley should be re-elected.

The poll also asked about Grassley’s infamous “pull the plug on grandma” statement. During a Congressional recess last August, Grassley told a townhall meeting in Winterset that Americans had every right to fear health care reform legislation because end-of-life counseling provisions could lead to government-supported euthanasia of the nation’s elderly population. Grassley repeated the false claim later the same day.

The poll asked, “When Sen. Chuck Grassley says President Obama and Democrats would ‘pull the plug on grandma,’ do you think that does Iowa proud in Congress or embarrasses Iowa?” Fifty-three percent called the statement an embarrassment, 28 percent said that it does Iowa proud, and 21 percent said they weren’t sure. Only in the 5th District, represented by U.S. Rep. Steve King, were a majority “proud” of the statement, with 30 percent saying they were embarrassed.

The “pull the plug on grandma” statement, which was part of the death panel meme Pulitzer Prize winning Web site PolitiFact named its “Lie of the Year,” dogged Grassley throughout the last few months of 2009 and was cited by at least one of the three Democrats vying to unseat him as the reason for entering the race.

After the national media, Iowa Democrats and even President Barack Obama criticized Grassley for spreading the debunked theory, he began walking his statement back. First, a Grassley aide told the Washington Post that the senator did not think the health bill would give the government authority in deciding when and how people die. Then, during an interview with the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Grassley agreed that health care legislation would not “pull the plug on grandma” and that he’d simply mimicked language President Obama had previously used.

The next month, Grassley told C-SPAN that if you “connect several dots” and read between the lines that it is fair to conclude that “the government is going to be in the middle of end of life issues just like they are in England.”

By the end of the year, though, Grassley was blaming media reports for his association with the death panels meme. In a letter to a constituent forwarded to The Iowa Independent, Grassley said some “commentators” took his comments and twisted them as saying that health care reform would establish death panels.

“I said no such thing,” Grassley said. “As I said then, putting end-of-life consultations alongside cost containment and government-run health care causes legitimate concern.”

The Research 2000 Iowa Poll was conducted in late February as part of a telephone survey gauging opinion on the public health insurance option. The findings were not released until Monday morning. A total of 600 likely general election voters in 2010 were interviewed statewide by telephone, including 199 Democrats (33 percent), 172 Republicans (29 percent) and 229 “independent/other” (38 percent). Quotas were assigned to reflect the voter registration of distribution by county.

The margin of error is 4 percent.