Mayor trails badly in poll

There's the court of law and the court of public opinion. Salt Lake County Mayor Nancy Workman appears to be in big trouble with both.

A new Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll, conducted Wednesday night after a panel of four county attorneys determined there is enough evidence to charge Workman with two felonies for misuse of public monies, found she now trails Democratic challenger Peter Corroon by 13 percentage points.

Just as bad, a third of Salt Lake County Republicans say Workman, a Republican seeking her first re-election to the countywide post, should get out of the race and let the county GOP pick another candidate, found pollster Dan Jones & Associates.

The survey of 408 adults living in the county was conducted as news broke over the panel's report to Salt Lake County Attorney Dave Yocom. A Democrat, it will be up to Yocom to decide if Workman is ultimately charged in the affair.

Workman admits to giving county Health Department funds to a local Boys and Girls Club to pay the salary of an office worker under the direction of Workman's daughter but says she did nothing criminally wrong.

She says she didn't follow proper paperwork in assigning the monies to the club. She told an afternoon press conference she wouldn't get out of the race.

Jones also asked if Workman should resign her post. Sixty-six percent said she should not resign, 26 percent said she should, 4 percent said she should take some other kind of action and 5 percent didn't know.

Workman's political problems and the new survey are both good political news for Corroon and independent candidate Merrill Cook, a former GOP U.S. congressman who left the Republican Party again this year to challenge a GOP incumbent.

Workman has only 23 percent support for re-election, Jones found in the Wednesday poll.

Corroon is favored by 36 percent of county residents and Cook by 10 percent. The other candidates pick up 1 percent support or less.

Twenty-six percent said they are undecided about who to vote for, an unusually high figure for a high-profile race. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.0 percent, said Jones, who has polled in Utah for 30 years.

Previous polls indicate that a number of those "undecideds" were formerly Workman supporters, and so she now has the challenge of winning them back as she likely fights formal charges in court. (Yocom said he'd decide in a day or two whether to file charges.)

Corroon and Cook will, of course, go after that now-larger undecided bloc.

Republicans in the county stand by Workman, saying she shouldn't resign, Jones found. Seventy-seven percent of fellow Republicans said she should stay in office.