DE PERE, WI (WTAQ) – U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin has taken a lot of heat for not doing anything for months about a critical report into problems at the Tomah VA Medical Center.
However, the controversy does not seem to be hurting the Wisconsin Democrat in the polls.
A new Wisconsin Public Radio-St. Norbert College survey shows that Baldwin has a 49 percent approval rating, while 36 percent disapprove of her job performance and 15 percent are not sure what to think.
Baldwin was given a 39 percent approval rating among registered Wisconsin voters in last week’s Marquette Law School poll — and that was two points higher than her 36 percent approval last October.
However, almost a quarter of the voters surveyed said they didn’t know enough about Baldwin’s job performance to make a judgment.
Baldwin has admitted mistakes in her office’s handling of an unreleased 2014 VA inspector general’s report into drug over-prescriptions at the Tomah veterans’ hospital.
The agency never publicized its findings, but the early results of a recent VA probe confirmed over-prescriptions of painkillers and punishment for employees who tried exposing it. A whistleblower tried to have Baldwin take action in Congress — but that didn’t happen until after the Center for Investigative Journalism blew the lid off the subject in January.
The St. Norbert survey interviewed 600 Wisconsin adults from April 8th through last Friday. The error margin is plus-or-minus 4 percent.
(Story courtesy of Wheeler News Service)
