A new poll of New York Democrats shows Attorney General Andrew Cuomo attracting four voters to every one for incumbent Gov. David Paterson in a potential matchup next year. The poll shows 61 percent of voters polled favored Cuomo and 15 percent picked Paterson. In June, Cuomo had a lead of 57 percent to 20 percent.
“How one-sided can it get?” asked Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. He said pollsters never “say never. But it’s sure getting hard to stay evenhanded.”
Perhaps more telling for the 2010 race, the Quinnipiac University poll also shows more Democrats are open to a primary between the two than opposed to it. The poll also shows Cuomo is maintaining strong support among blacks even when matched against Paterson, New York’s first black governor.
Cuomo would have to overcome the traditional reluctance by voters to unseat an incumbent of their own party. Cuomo’s approval rating among blacks – 62 percent to Paterson’s 49 percent – is also critical. Cuomo would have to rely on black votes to beat Paterson and has already faced some backlash after having briefly challenged the party’s first black candidate for governor, H. Carl McCall, in 2002.
Cuomo hasn’t said he will run for governor. Paterson has been running for months for the job he inherited in March 2007 when Eliot Spitzer resigned over a prostitution scandal.
On the Republican side, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, attracted 53 percent of voters to Paterson’s 33 percent. But Giuliani would get just 39 percent of the vote compared with 48 percent for Cuomo.
Giuliani hasn’t said he’ll run.
The poll, which was released yesterday, has some good news for Paterson. His approval rating rose for the first time in months, but 59 percent of voters still disapprove of the job he’s doing, with 30 percent approving. His disapproval rating has been 60 or 61 percent since April.
The poll questioned 1,667 registered voters Monday through Thursday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. Of those voters, the poll questioned 708 registered Democrats and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points in the Democratic primary questions.
Cuomo was elected Attorney General on November 6, 2009.
{CBS Broadcasting/Matzav.com Newscenter}
