The latest Public Polling Policy results out of Iowa and New Hampshire show that even Republican voters don’t want politicians to take marijuana policy into their own hands.
The survey, commissioned by the Marijuana Majority, found that 64% of Republican respondents in Iowa and 67% in New Hampshire believed that “states should be able to carry out their own marijuana laws without federal interference.” Democrats were even more unified in that belief, with 80% of those polled in Iowa and 77% in New Hampshire echoing the same sentiment.
“Our poll shows that across party lines, and regardless of personal support for legalization, the vast majority of voters simply want the feds to get out of the way and let states implement their own reforms without harassment,” said Marijuana Majority Chairman Tom Angell to Rolling Stone.
The Republicans who won’t back down on their promise to take matters into their hands with marijuana legalization appear to be suffering the consequences. Marco Rubio has fallen to seventh place in the race with 5.2% of the vote, while Chris Christie is losing support even among Republicans in his home state of New Jersey and trails Trump in the polls there.
Christie told attendees at a town hall meeting last month in New Hampshire, “I will enforce the federal laws. If you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it.”
Meanwhile, Rubio told radio host Hugh Hewitt last April that, “I don’t believe we should be in the business of legalizing additional intoxicants in this country for the primary reason that when you legalize something, you’re sending a message to young people that it can’t be that bad, because if it was that bad, it wouldn’t be legal.”
Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, who have both spoken out against marijuana legalization, have more recently expressed a willingness to accept it at the state level.
Most Democrats also appear to be adopting the same wait-and-see approach. Hillary Clinton said at a CNN town hall last year that “On recreational, states are the laboratories of democracy. We have at least two states that are experimenting with that right now. I want to wait and see what the evidence is.”