A majority of likely voters think the Virginia Democrat who raised money by performing sexual acts online should end her political campaign, a new poll found.
In the wake of the discovery of Virginia House of Delegates candidate Susanna Gibson’s pornographic Chaturbate account, 56% of surveyed voters in the state said the Democrat should drop out of the race, while 30% thought she should remain, according to the poll by Founders Insight and co/efficient, which was shared exclusively with The Daily Wire. Among Democrats, 44% said Gibson should drop out, compared to 39% who said she should continue her campaign.
The poll shows that core constituencies Virginia Democrats count on to turn out in elections — women, black, and young voters — signaled they may go in the opposite direction when it comes to Gibson. Women were significantly more likely than men to think she should drop out, with 60% of women saying she should quit.
Another group that Democrats bank firmly on, black voters, felt strongly that she must leave the race, with 62% saying she should drop out and only 18% saying she should stay in. And young people were not as open to the idea of a porn star as a candidate as Democrats might have hoped: 18 to 34-year-olds thought she should drop out by a 50%-40% margin, an even more negative view of the scandal than 35 to 44-year-olds.
Self-described moderates and independents also wanted her to drop out. Among the only demographic groups who said she should stay in the race were self-described liberals, 35 to 44-year-olds, and those who had not voted in any of the last four general elections.
Early voting begins Friday in Virginia’s pivotal 2023 elections, including the one in a swing district outside of Richmond that pits Democrat Susanna Gibson against Republican David Owen.
The poll surveyed 894 people between September 14 and September 18 and asked: “Recently, the Washington Post covered a story about a female candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates of live-streamed having sex with her husband while asking for money to perform other sex acts. Do you believe this disqualifies the candidate from running for office?”
The poll surveyed Virginia voters from around the state who were likely to vote in the general election. Though more voters in every media market wanted her to drop out than stay in, a bright spot for Gibson is that those in the Richmond area, which includes her Henrico district, reported the lowest percentage of voters calling for her to drop out, at 45% versus 38% who wanted her to stay in.
The high percentage of voters in the Richmond area who remained unsure about Gibson — significantly higher than those in the Washington, D.C., market — could be a result of the coverage provided by the local legacy media outlet, the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The story was broken by The Washington Post and covered by nearly all national outlets, but the local paper has largely looked the other way. Gibson has gone into hiding after the scandal, despite being hours from early voting beginning in a swing district where the partisan control of the entire House of Delegates could be in play.
She has refused to address the scandal or answer questions from media, including the Times-Dispatch. Yet on Tuesday, the Times-Dispatch allowed Gibson to run an op-ed on an unrelated issue, essentially a press release that allowed her to avoid hard questions.
After the move attracted questions about its journalistic integrity, the paper unpublished the op-ed, only to republish it.
It also appeared to pull up old positive stories about Gibson from its archives and pin them to its front page on Tuesday, despite it being unusual for a newspaper to put days-old stories on its homepage.
The paper did not return a request for comment from The Daily Wire.
Though some Democrats have defended the incident as a non-scandal because her conduct was not illegal, lawyers told The Daily Wire the Virginia prostitute statute likely applies to her conduct since she was taking money from people online in order to perform specific sex acts with another person, her husband on screen.
In the videos, the “Moms Demand Action”-endorsed candidate posted as “HotWifeExperience” and said that for money she would perform lewd sexual acts, including getting an unwitting hotel room service worker to walk in on her, urinating on camera, and even allowing viewers to do drugs off her body. Though she appears to reference drugs, there are no drugs visible in the videos.