President Joe Biden received his worst ever favorability and job approval ratings from registered New York voters, a Siena College poll released Tuesday found.
According to the poll, Biden has a negative 45-52% favorability rating, down from 50-45% last month, and a negative 46-51% job approval rating, down from 47-48% last month.
This all comes about a year out from the 2024 presidential election, in which Biden is largely expected to remain the Democratic nominee, although the poll found a small majority of New York Democrats, 52-41%, say they want a different nominee.
Former President Donald Trump has a 36-59% favorability rating among New Yorkers and Republicans view him favorably 70-24% and want to see him be their party’s nominee 61-32%.
Biden leads Trump 46-37% in a potential head-to-head matchup, which is down from 52-31% last month. In a four-way matchup, with independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornell West, Biden leads Trump by just seven points in the Empire State. Kennedy has 13% and West has 5%. In 2020, Biden carried New York by 22 points over Trump.
“Is New York still ‘true blue?’ True, 49% of voters are enrolled as Democrats and only 23% as Republicans. True, the last Republican presidential candidate to win here was Ronald Reagan in 1984. But also true is that just last year, a Republican came within seven points of being elected governor. And also true is that right now, Biden has his worst-ever New York favorability and job approval ratings,” said Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg. “The good news for Biden is the election is more than a year away. The bad news is there’s more bad news.”
Regarding the ongoing migrant situation in the state, a strong majority of voters, 84%, call the influx a serious problem, the poll found. Nearly two-thirds, up slightly from August, say New Yorkers have done enough for new migrants and must now work to slow the flow of migrants, compared with 29% who say the state should accept and work to assimilate them.
Voters also continue to give political leaders low marks on the issue, according to the poll.
“While a plurality of New Yorkers do not approve of the job [New York City Mayor Eric Adams] is doing to address the influx of migrants, a 58-32% majority of New Yorkers – including a narrow plurality of Democrats – agree with Adams’ statement that ‘this issue will destroy New York City.’ A majority of white (60%), Black (57%) and Latino (51%) voters all agree,” Greenberg said.
“Voters disapprove of the job Governor Kathy Hochul is doing to address the migrant influx by 15 points, but they disapprove of the job Adams is doing on the migrant issue by 16 points and they disapprove of the Biden Administration on this issue by a whopping 35 points, including a slight plurality of Democrats,” Greenberg continued.
The poll found that 9% of voters think the problem of crime in New York has gotten better over the last year, while 28% say it’s stayed about the same, and a majority, 59%, say it has gotten worse.
On the wars abroad, New Yorkers support providing more military and economic aid to Ukraine 51-38% and Israel 57-32%.
The poll was conducted from Oct. 15-19 among 1,225 New York registered voters. Of the respondents, 928 were contacted through a dual frame (landline and cell phone) mode and 297 respondents were drawn from a proprietary online panel.