Siena College poll out today that shows a continued downward trend in Governor Andrew Cuomo's job approval ratings (now down to 39% approval, 60% disapproval) and favorability ratings (49% favorable, 44% unfavorable), but it's the question on education that intrigued me most:
Has Governor Cuomo done an excellent, good, fair or poor job of improving the quality of education in New York State:
Excellent - 4%
Good - 20%
Fair - 32%
Poor - 41%
Don't Know - 3%
For those of you scoring at home, that's a 24% approval, 73% disapproval rating for Cuomo on education.
Think about those numbers for a moment
By nearly a 3-1 margin, New Yorkers disapprove of Cuomo's handling of education issues.
Cuomo just imposed a radical education reform agenda on the state during the last budget session that includes an unworkable teacher evaluation system sure to cause chaos in the system.
It will be interesting to see what Cuomo's rating on education issues is after a year or so of stories in the news about teachers getting rated "ineffective" based on test scores for students they don't teach in subjects they don't teach and that sort of thing.
Overall, Cuomo's approval and favorability continue to fall, and while that hasn't stopped Cuomo from being able to shove through much of his radical agenda this past year, don't think that he's not paying a political price for it.
Looking at the polling numbers in all three polls, the Marist poll, the Siena poll, and the Quinnipiac poll, the trend over the past couple of years has been clear - New Yorkers approve of Cuomo less and less as time goes on and like him less and less as time goes on.
Three more years of this trend and Cuomo will be below the Spitzer line, certainly in approval and perhaps in favorability too.
Cuomo gives 0% sh*ts about how he feels about this poll.
ReplyDeleteDisagree. He cares about polling because the lower he slides, the less power he has in Albany.
DeleteThink about the education tax credit he pushed.
Think that wouldn't have gone through if his approval was 60%-39% instead of 39%-60%?
Also, given the fall in approval and favorability with NYC voters in this poll (and that's my next piece coming in a little while), the trend will be a further fall for Cuomo, since NYC Dems are about the only thing holding him up above the Spitzer line.)
This stuff matters to pols because the lower they go, the more their fellow pols can say "Screw them."
Doesn't mean he won;t use his budgetary powers to impose his agenda (as he did this year.)
But it does mean he doesn't get as much as he would with higher ratings.
These percentages don't matter much. If running for governor today, he'd win no problem.
ReplyDeleteBut he's not running for governor today. He ran last year and won through some manipulation - the WFP debacle partly engineered by the unions that made sure Teachout didn't get on the ballot for the general. If he tries to run again in three years and he has ratings like this (particularly with Dems, where his rating has fallen sharply), you can bet he will face a third party challenge in the general. That makes an election a whole new ballgame.
DeleteThat's a ridiculous assertion..It would depend upon the person he's running against...He, like Hillary Clinton, is very beatable.
DeleteI agree with you, second anonymous. The more these ratings fall, the more beatable he becomes. Three years is a long time, so who knows what 2018 will bring, but if the polling trends continue for Cuomo, he's got serious trouble. Especially with NYC Dems starting to sour on him.
DeleteHe still gets most of what he wants. He is also a power hungry but delusional person. He actually believes that he is The King of New York. Poll numbers don't mean anything to him personally but I will agree with you that it means that maybe the Legislature might, and I mean might, be less inclined to back him if his numbers keep slipping in the future.
ReplyDeleteThe lower his numbers fall, the more people feel safe to challenge him - that's not just pols but also the press.
DeleteIt's the blood in the water analogy - the sharks pounce on the wounded.
Anyone that believes Cuomo doesn't care about this or any poll doesn't understand the first thing about politics. Politicians like Cuomo are constantly polling to gauge their support across the voting spectrum. They craft their positions by such polling. He is definitely paying attention to this.
ReplyDeleteIf NYSUT would stay strong and lead a crusade against this creep he would fold to at least some degree and sue for peace. But NYSUT is weak. For example, it donated $700 to Senator Carl Marcellino after he voted for the Cuomo education package despite being a former NYC science teacher. How could NYSUT donate to any politician after they stabbed all of us in the back?
I agree totally. Remember when NYSUT ran ads and drove down his numbers? If they kept that going, hammering him with every harmful action he takes, they could take him to the Spitzer level.
DeleteAlas, NYSUT/UFT/AFT aren't interested in destroying Cuomo the way he's interested in destroying us.
These aren't good numbers, but you're stretching quite a bit to say he has a 73% disapproval rating for education when 32% rated him Fair and 41% rated him Poor. I think you could actually more correctly say that 56% approve.
ReplyDeleteWhere do you get 56% approval?
DeleteWhen a polling outfit breaks responses down to Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, Excellent and Good become a positive rating and Fair and Poor become a negative rating.
Let's go through the poll again with that in mind:
Excellent 4%
Good 20%
That's 24% approval on education.
Fair 32%
Poor 41%
That's 73% disapproval.
That's where I got the numbers from.
I see Fair as (mild) approval, not disapproval.
DeleteRBE is right, pollsters count "fair" as being disapproval. I agree with your implication, though: many respondents who answer "fair" likely wouldn't do so if they knew it was going in the books as a negative rather than a neutral response.
DeleteAnyway, RBE has buried the lead here. One of the main purposes of this poll was to take the temperature of the public following BDB's calculated, months-in-the-making offensive against Cuomo. Cuomo didn't depants de Blasio in the poll as resoundingly as he does in real life, but the numbers are clear. If Cuomo has a vulnerability, it isn't from the left.