Vanderbilt poll: Most Tennesseans want Glen Casada to leave office, don't support vouchers

The vast majority of Tennessee voters believe House Speaker Glen Casada should leave office, according to the results of a Vanderbilt University poll released Thursday.

The statewide poll was conducted on roughly 1,000 individuals via landline and cellphones between May 9 and 23, beginning just three days after Casada's chief of staff Cade Cothren resigned amid a text messaging scandal that also involved the speaker. The margin of error is 3.8%.

Since the fallout of news broken by The Tennessean and NewsChannel 5 that Casada had engaged in sexually explicit text conversations about women with Cothren — and that Cothren had sent racist texts and admitted to using cocaine in the legislative office building — Casada has announced he will step down from his position as speaker effective Aug. 2.

But he has said he will not resign from office. The poll raised that question to respondents.

The university found that 63% of voters across party lines believe Casada should resign altogether in light of the sexually explicit messages he exchanged with Cothren.

John Geer, a co-director of the poll and political science professor at Vanderbilt, said voters' condemnation of Casada doesn't appear to have affected their perception of Gov. Bill Lee or the legislature as a whole.

Lee, as was former Gov. Bill Haslam, is the most popular politician in the state, with a favorability rating of 61% that makes him just as popular as the moderate Republican who left office in January.

"But their support base is different.” Geer said. “Lee’s support draws less from Democrats and independents and more from Republicans. This is significant and underscores what could be increasing polarization in the state.”

Tennesseans do not favor vouchers, poll says

In a statement on the poll results, Geer and fellow co-director Josh Clinton, also a political science professor, pointed to widening polarization in partisan politics in the state, an echo of what has taken place at the national level.

“We’re seeing the beginnings of a potential fracture in terms of what direction the state wants to go,” Clinton said. “On one hand, our political leaders could go all in for issues that matter to the Republican base, but which may not be reflective of the views of independents and Democrats. Or they can maintain a more consensus-based approach to policies that voters support broadly.”

While Tennesseans were unified on several issues — 74% for restoring felons' voting rights, 72% for a Katie Beckett Medicaid waiver for disabled children, 66% for automatically registering individuals to vote upon receiving a driver's license, 84% for mandatory vaccination to attend public school — the university found that two bills in particular from this legislative session "highlight the choices the Republican supermajority have to make about how they want to govern," according to a poll analysis.

Despite the General Assembly passing a bill to enact a school voucher program in Nashville and Memphis, only 40% of Tennesseans favor the measure.

Another controversial piece of legislation, the fetal heartbeat bill — which passed in the House but that stalled in the Senate after Lt. Gov. Randy McNally intervened to stop it — has just 41% support around the state, the poll found.

"That’s the kind of issue that’s supported by a majority of Republicans, but almost no one in any other group," Clinton said. "So the question is, how hard do you push on those types of issues versus other bipartisan issues like opioids? And I don’t think we know yet. Those fracture lines are there, and it’s going to come down to the decisions our elected leaders make.”

The poll found that 69% of voters rate drug and alcohol addiction in the state a "big problem," while 60% were supportive of expanding Medicaid to include more low-income adults.

Based on the poll, the approval rating for U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander is 46% and U.S. Sen Marsha Blackburn's approval rating 45%. The approval rating for President Donald Trump is 54%, for the state legislature 52% and for Congress just 26%.

Reach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.

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