Cuomo Leads Cynthia Nixon and GOP Hopefuls in 2018 Re-Election Poll

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York is entering his re-election campaign with a commanding lead over both his Republican rivals and a possible Democratic primary opponent, actress Cynthia Nixon, according to a new poll from Siena College.

The survey shows Cuomo ahead of Nixon among Democratic voters by 66 to 19 percent. He leads her by a wide margin among every subgroup in the survey: men and women, moderates and liberals, black, white and Latino voters, upstate and New York City residents.

Best known for her role in “Sex and the City,” Nixon entered the contest only Monday, after the poll had been completed, but had said she was exploring a bid and had been in contact with political strategists with experience running progressive campaigns. A longtime education activist in the state, Nixon has the benefit of name recognition, and yet remains broadly unknown to voters, with 60 percent saying they had no opinion of her.

The poll showed Cuomo with a 2-1 advantage over both his potential Republican challengers, state Sen. John DeFrancisco and Marc Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive, who is expected to formally declare his candidacy at the beginning of April.

Cuomo had a 52 percent approval rating in the survey, essentially unchanged from a month earlier.

The survey was conducted as the two-month corruption trial of one of Cuomo’s former top aides, Joseph Percoco, ended in a guilty verdict last week. Cuomo and his team regularly emphasized that the governor himself was not charged with wrongdoing in the case.

The state Democratic Party also spent $100,000 last week, while the poll was being conducted, on a television ad in the New York City area promoting Cuomo’s record on gun control.

“Mostly, this survey provides the governor with good news,” said Steven Greenberg, who conducted the poll.

Greenberg noted that Cuomo’s job-approval rating did slide to 42 percent, with the percentage of New York voters who said he was doing a poor job rising to 25 percent, equaling the high in a Siena College poll.

Since his 2014 re-election, Cuomo has tacked to the left politically, passing an increase in the minimum wage, paid family leave and other measures as his political operation has tried to rebrand him as a progressive after a first term in which he emphasized governing from the political center.

In the poll, more New Yorkers, 46 percent, rated Cuomo as a “liberal” than in any past survey. That is more than double the 21 percent who said in February 2011, his second month in office, that he was a liberal.

But among Democratic voters, a majority, 52 percent, still viewed Cuomo as a moderate, compared with only 34 percent of Democrats who labeled him a liberal.

Nixon is expected to challenge Cuomo from the political left. She has been in talks with former advisers to Mayor Bill de Blasio, Bill Hyers and Rebecca Katz, two architects of his 2013 mayoral bid.

“One of the ideas that’s out there, that’s floating among the chattering class is that Cuomo has a problem with liberals,” Greenberg said. “That’s a canard. The truth is Cuomo has a problem with liberal leadership.”

Overall, Cuomo’s standing heading into his re-election year appears to have slightly deteriorated from four years ago.

In March 2014, a Siena College survey had 49 percent of New York voters saying they intended to vote to re-elect Cuomo, with 41 percent saying they preferred an alternative.

This month’s poll showed a 48-46-percent split on the same question.

The statewide poll was conducted from March 11 to 16, with 772 registered New York voters, and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The sample of Democrats included 358 voters, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 6 percentage points. Greenberg noted that it was not a sample of likely Democratic primary voters.