Two-thirds of New York voters want Santos out of Congress, poll finds

Two-thirds of New York state voters, including 58 percent of statewide Republicans, say that Gay Rep. George Santos (R-NY) should resign, according to a new Siena College poll. This poll concurs as a newly unearthed recording found Santos lying to a judge in 2017. The 2017 lie is just the iceberg tip of Santos’s many falsehoods.

The poll found that 66 percent of voters statewide said Santos should resign from Congress. The percentage is an increase from the 59 percent of New York voters who said last month that he should resign.

Related:

George Santos cosponsors bill calling for rollback of LGBTQ+ rights

No other LGBTQ+ House member backs the bill.

“The ‘good’ news for Santos is that even in these hyper-partisan times, he’s found a way to get Democrats, Republicans, and independents to agree about a political figure,” said Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg. “The bad news for Santos is that the political figure they agree on is him, and they overwhelmingly view him unfavorably.”

Greenberg pointed out that the poll found that 72 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents, and 58 percent of Republicans all said they want Santos to resign.

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A January 23 Siena College poll found that 71 percent of New York City suburbanites think Santos should resign. Only 8 percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of Santos. Earlier this month, 25 local constituents brought a petition to Santos’s New York City headquarters calling on him to resign, but he hid in his office, saying that he refused to meet with a “mob.”

Santos has admitted to lying to “everyone” about his largely fabricated personal history. He has admitted that he lied about graduating from Baruch College and New York University, working directly for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, and living at a fake address in his congressional district. Recently, a 2017 recording emerged of Santos lying to a judge about working for Goldman Sachs.

He has provided no additional proof to back up claims that he lost four employees in the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, that he attended Horace-Mann college preparatory school, and that he is legally married to the man he currently refers to as his husband. He also claimed his Jewish grandparents fled Nazi persecution in Ukraine, but genealogical records showed that his grandparents were born in Brazil. Santos has since claimed that he’s not Jewish, but rather “Jew-ish.”

Santos was part of Rio’s drag scene in the late 2000s (despite initially claiming that he was never a drag queen). He was a prominent “Gays for Trump” advocate in the late 2010s, and reportedly dated men while he was married to a woman. He and his now-ex-wife’s arrangement has led some to question whether he married so that she could obtain U.S. citizenship through Santos.

Santos has also been accused of check fraud in Brazil and faces multiple ethics complaints in Congress as local and federal investigators examine his campaign finances. He has even been accused of stealing money designated for the medical care of a veteran’s dying dog.

Republicans are quietly looking for someone to replace Santos. He is facing multiple ethics complaints as local and federal investigators examine his campaign finances. In Congress, he has aligned himself with rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and said in an interview that LGBTQ+ families “create troubled individuals.”