More Nevada voters disapprove of Sen. John Ensign, R-NV, but a majority of them still do not want him to resign in the wake of a scandal over his extramarital affair with a campaign staffer, according to a Mason-Dixon poll conducted for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Ensign, who was re-elected to his Senate seat in 2006, admitted to the affair and later fired his mistress and her husband, who was chief of staff for his Senate office. He also acknowledged that his parents paid $96,000 to the family of his mistress.
That has not rested well with the state's voters, just 31 percent of whom say they have a favorable view of the senator, a drop of 22 percentage points from before the affair was revealed in mid June and eight points lower than a month ago.
Still, 54 percent of the voters responding to the poll say they do not want the senator to resign.
Nevertheless, the voters are troubled by the affair, the firings, the payment of money, and the tangled personal relationships between Ensign's family and the family of his mistress, who was a friend of Ensign's wife, the newspaper said.
Fifty-eight percent of Nevada voters responding to the poll said they consider it "very serious" that Ensign violated his vow to a fundamentalist group of Christian men, called the "Promise Keepers." The fourth of the seven promises members of that group make is, "A Promise Keeper is committed to building strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values."
The poll was based on interviews conducted July 14-15 among 400 Nevadans who vote in state elections and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.
To see how the 2010 Senate races are shaping up, check out the CQ Politics' election map.
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