70 percent of New Jersey residents want Menendez to resign: poll

A majority of New Jersey residents in a new poll said they want Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) to resign after federal prosecutors indicted him on charges of bribery, fraud, extortion and acting as a foreign agent to Egypt.

The Farleigh Dickinson University (FDU) poll shows 70 percent of the respondents want Menendez to resign. Only 16 percent say the senator should serve out the rest of his term, which ends in January of 2025.  

Broken down by party, 71 percent of Democrats say Menendez should step down, while 67 percent of independents and 80 percent of Republicans agree he should go.

“Menendez has been able to weather charges in the past,” Dan Cassino, a government and politics professor at FDU and director of the poll, said. “But this time it just doesn’t seem like he has any real support left.”  

A spokesperson for Menendez criticized the poll for not taking into account Menendez’s legal defense and its possible impact on voter sentiment.

“The FDU poll is fundamentally flawed – reflecting the reality that the public has only seen a limited set of facts presented by the prosecution to be as salacious as possible,” the spokesperson said. “Once the truth is known and the real facts are presented, the polling will change once the senator is found innocent.”

Menendez has repeatedly said he will not step down from office.  

He said a superseding indictment accusing him of acting as a foreign agent was an “attempt to wear someone down.” 

“Piling new charge upon new charge does not make the allegations true. The facts haven’t changed, only a new charge,” he said in statement earlier this month.

More than half of the Senate Democratic conference has called on Menendez to resign, though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) hasn’t yet taken that step.  

But Schumer said he had “private conversations” about Menendez’s legal problems and told reporters Tuesday that the New Jersey senators would not attend a classified briefing on the situation in Israel and Garza.  

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) confronted Menendez in the Senate subway area Tuesday, telling his colleague as they rode an escalator in opposite directions that it would be a good day for the New Jersey senator to resign.  

Menendez shot back that Fetterman was hanging onto the issue too closely, implying that the Pennsylvania senator had become obsessed by the legal drama. 

Fetterman on Thursday cited the poll as another reason for Menendez to leave the Senate.  

“In the most recent poll, 16 percent — only 16 percent — of New Jersey voters want him to remain,” he said.  

The FDU poll was conducted from Oct. 6-14 and surveyed 813 respondents. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence interval.

This story was updated at 6:37 p.m.