ALBANY — Governor Spitzer appears to be backing away from his threat to shut down the government if he and lawmakers fail to reach a budget agreement by the April 1 deadline, having tentatively agreed to extend state operations for two weeks in the event of a breakdown in negotiations, lawmakers say.

Mr. Spitzer, who hasn’t ruled out a shutdown, is apparently signaling to lawmakers that he is leaning against taking such a drastic step amid fresh signs that his overwhelming popularity among voters is wearing off.

A new poll released yesterday found that the governor’s favorability rating has dropped by 12 points in the past month, a period in which the governor and his plan to trim hospitals and nursing home funding have been the target of a scathing multimillion-dollar television ad campaign waged by the hospital industry.

Spitzer administration officials said the governor was aggressively pursuing a budget agreement and was negotiating directly with legislative leaders yesterday in a series of closed-door meetings. Negotiations were expected to continue late into the night.

All sides said the governor and lawmakers had moved closer to a budget agreement, and that it was possible a deal could be reached as early as today. The governor and legislators have until as late as Wednesday or Thursday to reach an agreement and print the bills in advance of the April 1 deadline, the start of the fiscal year.

Lawmakers, however, were also preparing for an impasse. The Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, told his conference members that if lawmakers missed the budget deadline, the Assembly would interrupt its scheduled two-week holiday break and return to Albany for a session on April 11, lawmakers told The New York Sun.

Mr. Silver also said Mr. Spitzer — in the event that talks stall — would put forward a special appropriations bill to extend government operations for two additional weeks. Mr. Silver, who has allied with the governor during negotiations, said yesterday that he opposes a government shutdown. “We don’t have to create turmoil,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the governor, Christine Anderson, denied that Mr. Spitzer had agreed to continue state operations. “We view that as entirely premature. We are entirely focused on getting an on-time budget,” Ms. Anderson said.

Mr. Spitzer met with his chief adversary in the budget negotiations, the Republican Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, for an hour and a half, but failed to reach a firm compromise on the most divisive issues, including the geographic distribution of education funding.

Mr. Bruno has sought to roll back some of the governor’s most high-profile budget proposals: the Republican Senate, whose most important base of support is in Long Island, has opposed Mr. Spitzer efforts to direct new property tax relief to middle-class homeowners, to trim Medicaid funding of hospitals and nursing homes by hundreds of millions of dollars, and to steer a greater percentage of education dollars to New York City.

Mr. Spitzer’s proposed Medicaid cuts have provoked the angriest reaction from interest groups.

The state’s largest hospital employees union, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, has spent millions of dollars on television ads in an effort to drive down the governor’s poll numbers and pressure him restore the cuts. One ad features a frail elderly woman saying, “Governor Spitzer, I want you to look at me. And when you cut health care, I want my face to be in front of you. Remember me.” Mr. Spitzer has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his campaign cash on his own ad campaign defending his budget.

A poll conducted by the Siena Research Institute found that 62% of voters have a favorable opinion of the governor, a drop of 12 percentage points from last month, and Mr. Spitzer’s lowest point as a politician in a year. The governor’s unfavorable rating has increased to 20% from 12% over the same period, according to Siena.

Slightly fewer than half of registered voters rated Mr. Spitzer’s performance as governor “excellent” or “good,” while 39% rated his record as “fair” or “poor,” according to the poll. A poll taken by the same institute in February found that 58% of voters had a favorable opinion of Mr. Spitzer’s job performance, and 24% did not.

Voters also signaled a growing pessimism. For the first time since Mr. Spitzer, a former state attorney general, took office in January, a majority of New Yorkers no longer says New York is moving in the right direction. Voters were evenly split on whether the state was headed on the right track, the poll found.

The poll, conducted between March 19 and 22, surveyed 622 registered voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.