Poll: Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s Approval Rating Less Than 35 Percent as He Seeks to Redefine ‘Sex’

AP Photo/Matt Rourke
AP/Matt Rourke

A new poll shows that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) has an approval rating of less than 35 percent going into a re-election bid in 2018.

Among a random sample of 1,031 likely voters, only 34.86 percent said they approve of the job Wolf has done, while 43.38 percent disapprove, and 21.76 percent are undecided.

Keystone Report published the poll, which was commissioned by the Washington, D.C.-based American Principles Project (APP), an organization committed to the Constitution and the founding principles.

APP notes the majority of Democrat respondents said they were less likely to support Wolf when they learned about his support for a “gender identity” mandate on schools.

“When told Wolf supports school policies that force children to share shower facilities with members of the opposite sex, 71 percent of voters said they were less likely to support the Governor, including 51 percent of Democrats,” APP states in a press release.

“Democrats are going to be extremely upset with their own governor — 51 percent said they were less likely to vote for him — when they find out he is pushing policies that would force their children into showers with members of the opposite sex,” said Terry Schilling, APP’s executive director. “If Republicans have the intestinal fortitude to message on this issue — if they have the courage to do both what is right and what is politically smart — Gov. Wolf will lose tens of thousands of Democrat votes because of his radical agenda. He won’t be able to recover from that.”

The poll results are released as Wolf – recently rated the nation’s most liberal governor – installed a new chairman of the state’s Human Relations Commission to further his agenda to redefine the word “sex” to make sexual orientation/gender identity (SOGI) a protected class.

Wolf named a transgender woman, Dr. Rachel Levine, to serve as the state’s physician general. Levine had been a professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. In addition, Levine worked with that school’s Office of Diversity as a mentor to LGBT students and faculty, and was a board member of Equality PA.

In a move that Michael Geer, president of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, describes at the Daily Signal as one that “mimics the Obama administration’s executive and bureaucratic overreaches,” the state’s Human Relations Commission announced it’s proposal to redefine the word “sex” in the state’s discrimination law.

Geer writes:

This proposal wouldn’t change the law—only the commission’s “guidance” on the matter. But this new “guidance” would mean the law would be enforced as if it had changed.

This guidance comes on the heels of repeated failures to accomplish the same outcome through the legitimate way of changing laws—through the legislative process and with the consent of the governed.

Geer notes that, thus far, Pennsylvania lawmakers have been successful at thwarting the adoption of a measure, known as the Fairness Act, that would redefine the word “sex,” despite significant amounts of lobbying and spending on the part of national groups.

“This change in guidance by the [Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission] effectively means a change in law, a change that would be devastating to personal privacy and religious liberty,” Randall Wenger, chief counsel of the Independence Law Center, said, Geer reports.

When participants in the APP Pennsylvania poll were asked if they “support individuals using the facility that corresponds with their sex at birth or the facility with which they individually identify,” 55.76 percent responded “birth sex” and 31.21 percent “personal identification,” with 13.03 percent having no opinion formed.

Only 6.83 percent of respondents said they support using puberty blocking drugs to delay puberty in children who claim to identify as the opposite sex, while 58.84 percent said they oppose such drugs, and 34.33 percent said they had no opinion.

The poll, performed by Revily, Inc., was conducted from April 11 – April 13. The survey’s margin of error is + 3.05 percentage points.

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