TIME POLL: Nixon’s Defenders Close Ranks

As President Nixon refuses to resign and digs in to fight impeachment, the sizable minority of Americans who want him to continue in office is solidifying into a loyalist bastion that is supporting him with growing determination. According to the latest poll conducted for TIME by Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., Americans are becoming increasingly polarized, with 53% wanting Nixon out of office and 38% wanting him to stay.

In early May, a week after the President released the White House transcripts of the Watergate tapes, Yankelovich workers interviewed a national sampling of 771 people by telephone and discovered significant differences between the President’s supporters last August—when 60% of the respondents in a similar poll wanted him to last it out—and the hard core of 38% who back him now.

Compared with the August figures, the Nixon loyalists today are more likely to be over 50 years of age (36% v. 42%), not to have gone to college (58% v. 64%), to be blue-collar workers (38% v. 42%), and live in the South (34% v. 40%). The Nixonites of last August who have since deserted the President are almost entirely under 35, have attended college, and hold white-collar jobs.

Forty-one percent of those Nixon supporters who had read or heard reports of the transcripts felt that they showed the President to be innocent of any wrongdoing, and 46% of pro-Nixon respondents maintained that they did not prove anything one way or the other. Fully 48% of Nixon loyalists reported that the transcripts showed the President to be “a warm and friendly human being,” and 28% ended up feeling even more sympathetic to him than before. Only 36% of the President’s backers found the language shocking, and just 24% felt that the transcripts disclosed a man trying to save his own skin.

Yankelovich found sharp lines of cleavage between those who feel that Nixon should stay and those who are convinced he must go.

> Only 14% of the pro-Nixonites feel that he has acted as if he were above the law, compared with 78% of the anti-Nixonites.

> Nearly two-thirds of the Nixon loyalists think that the media have victimized the President, compared with 14% of those who want him out.

> Only 36% of the Nixon supporters back Congress in demanding more tapes, compared with 86% of the President’s opposition.

> More than two-thirds (69%) of Nixon’s adherents are concerned that U.S. foreign relations would suffer if the President left office, a point worrying only 35% of those who want him to go.

The TIME/Yankelovich Poll found that the defense of the President by the Nixon loyalists rests on three beliefs:

First, a feeling that the President’s associates are to blame for his troubles rather than Nixon himself. More than half (59%) of the President’s supporters agree that the transcripts reveal “a small group of sleazy operators who put their own interests ahead of the country.”

Second, the prevailing view that politics is a dirty game. The transcripts, say 74% of Nixon’s backers, show “people practicing politics as usual.”

Third, the conviction that the President has the right to bend the law a little —or even to break laws—if he is acting in the best interests of the nation. More than half (55%) of the Nixon loyalists support this view, a belief sharply denied by 70% of those who want Nixon out of office.