Campaigns & Elections

Things are looking up for the governor in the second poll of the day. Susan Watts/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul

It’s a tale of two polls. 

Quinnipiac University released its first survey of gubernatorial race Wednesday afternoon that has Gov. Kathy Hochul leading Republican nominee Bruce Blakeman by a whopping 19 points. It came out hot on the heels of a Siena University poll that showed the contest for governor with a 9-point margin.  

The new Quinnipiac poll – which surveyed 1,026 likely voters between Sept. 17 and 20 and has a 4.1 percentage point margin of error – found Hochul ahead of Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, 58%-39%. Only 2% of those polled said they were still undecided. What’s more, the vast majority of the likely voters surveyed said they were not at all likely to change their votes. The poll found that 76% of those who chose Hochul said as much, as well as 83% of those who picked Blakeman.

“Four years after Kathy Hochul won the governor’s race by single digits, she appears positioned, at the moment, to have a wider lane on the road to being reelected,” Mary Snow, Quinnipiac University Poll assistant director, said in a statement. “Likely voters prefer her to be in Albany handling the cost of living and the economy, their top concerns, and that is putting her at a sizable advantage over Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman.”

That paints a very different picture compared to the Siena University poll released earlier Wednesday. That survey found Hochul leads Blakeman among likely voters by just a 9-point margin, 50%-41%. That was largely unchanged from Siena’s previous poll of likely voters in August.  

Many observers have compared Hochul’s performance in this year’s Siena polls to those from four years ago when she first ran against former Rep. Lee Zeldin. In September, Siena had Hochul leading her Republican opponent by 14 points – but she wound up winning by a meager 6 points in November. 

But Siena’s polling in 2022 was consistently off compared to the final election results. Even in October, less than a month before the election, Siena still had Hochul leading by 11 points. Quinnipiac, on the other hand, found the incumbent governor led Zeldin by just 4 points in its own October poll. It was Quinnipiac’s only survey of the race, but when compared to Siena’s final poll that month, it turned out to be the more accurate predictor. 

Snow told City & State that Quinnipiac intends to release another poll of the gubernatorial race before Election Day on Nov. 3, but did not specify when it would go into the field.

– With reporting by Sophie Krichevsky.