Statewide Poll Finds Voters Want Change
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ALBANY – A new statewide poll out this past week has demonstrated, yet again, that New York voters don’t think much of their state government, and crave change.
The findings from the Siena College Research Institute help explain why candidates for statewide office, from governor on down, are tripping over one another to present themselves as reformers or, better yet, “outsiders.”
“By definition, I’m not an Albany insider,”a former Massachusetts governor, William Weld, proudly proclaimed recently. He is now seeking the GOP nomination for governor in his native New York.
Waiting in the wings on the Republican side is billionaire businessman Thomas Golisano, the Independence Party’s three-time losing candidate for governor. Those candidacies alone give Mr. Golisano outsider credentials that are hard to match.The owner of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team has said he will decide this month if he will seek the GOP nomination this time around.Most political observers think he will. He went to the trouble of switching his party registration to the GOP in October.
On the Democratic side, the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, is the only announced candidate for governor, and he likes to remind everyone that he has made a name for himself by taking on Wall Street and other American institutions. And he regularly talks about reforming state government. Waiting in the wings with an expected challenge to Mr. Spitzer for the Democratic nomination is Nassau County ExecutiveThomas Suozzi,who doesn’t just talk about fixing Albany. He actually formed a political action committee in 2004 called “Fix Albany” that helped unseat a couple of incumbent state legislators that year.
The potential appeal of being seen as a reform-minded or outsider candidate for the 2006 election has escaped none of the candidates and the political operatives managing their campaigns.They read their own polls.
For the public, the Siena College poll provides some insight into what kind of numbers the candidates and their handlers have been looking at. The poll, sponsored by the conservative Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy, found that almost six in 10 voters were dissatisfied with the performance of their state government.
