By BRUCE LOWITT
Residents in George Santos’ congressional district in New York strongly agree that he should give up his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives but have seriously differing opinions on the punishment he should face for all his lying.
A Newsday/Siena College poll found that 78 percent of voters in District 3, covering parts of Queens and Long Island, want him to resign. That includes 71 percent of registered Republican voters but only 0.5 percent of those identifying themselves as Oath Keepers or Proud Boys.
Of the 22 percent who felt Santos should not resign, all but one self-identified as morons and that one swore he was Eric Trump but couldn’t prove it.
Of those voters wanting him out of office, 94 percent also want him entirely out of the district, 87 percent want him out of New York State, 82 percent want him out of the United States and 63 percent want him out of the Western Hemisphere – although more than 96 percent of that 63 percent say he should go back to Brazil.
Despite Santos’ already having stepped down “temporarily” from his Congressional committee assignments, thousands of people who weren’t asked anything beyond whether they were for or against him remaining in office offered suggestions on what else the 34-year-old congenital liar should experience beyond dismissal.
While “tarring and feathering” and “being ridden out of town on a rail” were most often suggested, according to a Newsday pollster who asked not to be identified, “a lot of folks thought he should be pilloried, literally, meaning in the center of the Long Island Rail Road Terminal.”
More than two dozen fans of the television series Game of Thrones mentioned rat torture and a number of Long Island boat owners suggested keel hauling, the pollster said.
Then there were voters who expressed anger that Santos still hadn’t voluntarily given up his seat.
“A number of people asked if impaling is still legal,” Pastor Nathan Swanson, lead pastor of the Bible Church in Port Washington, N.Y., said. “It’s not, but I can understand how some people might feel.”
The total number of District 3 votes cast in the 2022 congressional election was 271,288, or 36.3 percent of the district’s 746,449 population (Santos winning 145,824 to 125,404 over Democrat Robert Zimmerman). But the number of people responding to the Newsday/Siena College poll totaled 733,519 – meaning 98.26 percent of the district’s residents wanted to have their say.
“When we announced we were going to conduct a poll on Santos we had people trying to break down our doors to let him know how they felt about him,” Newsday politics reporter Scott Eidler said. “It was like a crowd that couldn’t get into a Taylor Swift concert. The police had their hands full controlling the mob.”
It was the same 175 miles north of the newspaper, where Siena College Dean of Students Michael Papadopoulos said the Loudonville, N.Y., campus “was overrun by people wanting to let us know what a piece of … well, I can’t use the word but it rhymes with spit … he is. The only good thing about Mr. Santos, and I use that word grudgingly, is that he got a lot more students and other people to care about politics for a change.”
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