With the election behind us, attention in Albany is turning to the new legislative session in January and the looming 2026 race for governor. In recent months, Governor Kathy Hochul has been hoping to turn around her lagging poll numbers. A new poll from the Siena College Research Institute finds relatively bad news on that front for the Democrat: just a third of voters said they would re-elect her, and her favorability rating is just 39 percent. To break down the numbers, Siena’s Steve Greenberg spoke with WAMC’s Ian Pickus.
Hi, Steve.
Hello, Ian, how you doing?
I think I'm probably doing better than Governor Hochul’s political office, if they've been watching this poll. These are really not great numbers, right?
Yeah. I mean, you certainly hit on the bad side. I mean, I will give her the good side, which is that, for the second consecutive poll, her favorability rating and her job approval rating are both up a little bit. So where she hit her all-time low in September, she picked a little bit back up in October, and a little bit more now here in December. So now 39% view her favorably. 49% unfavorably, but up from October when it was 36%-51%. And her job approval rating is getting close to break even. It's now at 46% approve of the job she's doing, 49%, a plurality, disapprove. But again, back in October, it was 41% approve, 51% disapprove. So her numbers are coming back a little bit. The bad news is really what you hit on, which is her re- elect number only 33% of New Yorkers are prepared to re-elect her. 57% say they would prefer ‘someone else.’ Among Democrats, only 48% of Democrats say they're prepared to re-elect Hochul. 40% of Democrats would prefer someone else. And when we only asked Democrats, should Hochul be the nominee of your party in 2026 or should she not? 49%, not quite a majority, but 49% said she should be the nominee of the Democrats in two years. 32% of Democrats said she should not.
Now, to paraphrase what the governor has said when asked about things like this, she talks about actually doing the work and governing, and it's not the election season right now, so she's not focused on that. That being said, this poll is not in a vacuum, obviously. We know the race against Lee Zeldin two years ago was much closer than Democrats would have liked. Having watched Albany as long as you have, is there still runway left for her to turn things around?
There is runway, but even though it's still two years away, time is running out, and I say this for this reason: she has now been governor for almost a full term, if you take the part she took over from Cuomo. She has been governor for nearly three and a half years in a state where 49% of the enrolled voters are Democrats. Nearly half of the enrolled voters in the state are Democrats. In three and a half years, her favorability rating has never once hit 50%. So this is not in a vacuum. While this particular poll is a snapshot in time, if you look at the snapshots over the last three-plus years, you see she has never been popular with New York voters. So the question is, if she says, you know, now is not the time to campaign. Well, even during campaign time two years ago, voters never came to really give her a positive favorability rating. So she's got her work cut out for her, that's for sure.
So looking at some other questions in the poll, what are some of the issues that are driving New Yorkers’ feelings?
Far and away, the number one issue right now that voters feel and that voters want Albany to address is the cost of living. 43% of New Yorkers, when given a choice of four issues, cost of living, the availability of affordable housing, the recent influx of migrants, and crime, among those four issues, what's the single most important one you want Albany working on? 43% said cost of living, nearly half. So if you ask voters their top two priorities, 71%, more than two-thirds of voters say cost of living is one of their top two priorities for Albany this year, 48%, nearly half say the availability of affordable housing is one of their top two issues this year, and 35% say the recent influx of migrants, 38% say crime is one of their top two issues. So economic issues are the top two issues that voters want Albany to address.
Now as we speak, we have heard Governor Hochul’s first priority for her State of the State coming up January 14, which is to issue a tax refund check of $300 to $500 for most New Yorkers. So it seems like the governor's office agrees that affordability is the main focus in the state.
Well, yeah, let's see if voters know what she's going to propose. We'll certainly go back in after her State of the State address next month, hear all the proposals, ask voters about a lot of them, and see whether voters think there are good ideas or bad ideas, and whether they think she can get it done or not.
Now, how does this current poll compare to Governor Hochul standing since taking office? I mean, I know that it's notable she's never been over 50% favorability, but she has fluctuated a bunch, hasn't she?
Absolutely. Look, between the , end of 2021, and now three years later, the end of 2024, her favorability rating has varied some from between the mid-30s to the mid-40s. But the bad news for her is that she has not been in positive territory in nearly a year. You'd have to go back to the first month of 2024, January, when her favorability rating was in positive territory, 45% to 42%. For the rest of this year, she's been underwater with voters.
What about the president-elect? Obviously, no stranger to New York voters and Republicans did make some gains in November in the Empire State. How are people thinking about Donald Trump nowadays?
Pretty much the same way they've always thought about him. Look, New Yorkers know Donald Trump very well. Siena has been polling on Donald Trump for more than a decade now, because he was making moves potentially to run for governor back more than a decade ago. So right now, 37% of New Yorkers view Trump favorably. 59% view him unfavorably. Not surprisingly, a huge partisan divide there. 83% of Democrats view Trump unfavorably, 85% of Republicans view him favorably, and independents, not so much. 37% view him favorably, a majority of independents, 53%, view him unfavorably. His overall favorability rating is 37% to 59%. If we go back to the month he took office for the first time, back in January 2017, at the time, Trump had a 37%-55% favorability rating, almost identical to what it is today. So voters have a pretty strong reaction to Donald Trump, positive and negative, and it really has not changed very much over the last several years.
