(Heh, Reagan on the Watergate burglers, "Not criminals at heart." Yup, Gordon Liddy, Colson, Segretti, and E.Howard Hunt, Boy Scouts.)
http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/02/13/cq/poll.html
Ronald D. Elving, CQ Staff Writer
>...While the revelations accumulated, the rest of the country tuned
out. That November, Nixon carried 49 states in winning re-election.
More than two months later, as the first Watergate defendants were
going to court in January 1973, Nixon's numbers in the Gallup Poll
were among the most robust of his presidency: 68 percent approval to
25 percent disapproval (a near match with Clinton's figures for late
January 1998).
Of course, that was before Nixon began talking about invoking executive privilege to prevent White House aides from testifying about an alleged cover-up. When that key phrase, "executive privilege," became part of the discussion, Nixon's numbers started their descent.
In February, the Senate voted 70-0 to empanel an investigating committee of its own. Nixon's approval rating in the first week of April stood at 54 percent in the Gallup Poll. Most Americans were still withholding judgment.
Even after the April 30 speech in which Nixon announced the resignation of his closest aides, many Republicans continued to rally around the president. The Senate Republican leader, Hugh C. Scott of Pennsylvania, said the speech had proved that the president was "determined to see this affair thoroughly cleaned up." The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, said the Watergate bugging had been illegal but that "criminal" was too harsh a term because the convicted burglars were "not criminals at heart."
That same month, Republican state party chairmen meeting in Chicago adopted a resolution blaming "a few overzealous individuals" for Watergate and lending unequivocal support to the president. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew accused the press of using "hearsay" and other tactics that were "a very short jump from McCarthyism." The same comparison was picked up by the man who had succeeded McCarthy in the Senate, Democrat William Proxmire of Wisconsin, who said the media had been "grossly unfair" to Nixon.
By then, however, the bleeding in the Gallup Poll had dropped Nixon to just 48 percent approval in the first week of May -- a drop of 20 percentage points since January. And that rating would keep on falling through the 25 percent level before Nixon's resignation in August 1974. <SNIP>
I worked as a phone interviewer for the Field Poll a couple of yrs. ago. They were within 1% of the actual popular vote percentage, in their projections for every Pres. election from '48-'04. -- Michael Pugliese