Writing about this week’s
, Politico’s Maggie Haberman suggested an exciting new narrative of the race between Paladino and Andrew Cuomo:
The back and forth came as Marist College released a poll showing a tightening race, with Cuomo leading 53 percent to Paladino’s 38 percent and the two basically tied in the suburbs.
So Paladino came out trailing by 15 points, and his opponent is favored by more than half of the electorate. But if you ignore the 8 million people in New York City, he’s almost competitive.
Actually, even that fantasy is a gross misrepresentation of the poll. Where Haberman says “basically tied,”
says “49% of likely voters in the suburbs toss their support behind Cuomo while 43% believe they will vote for Paladino.”
In other words, the poll says that while a sample of New York’s millions of urban dwellers found they really, really hate Paladino—in New York City, the preference for Cuomo was 70-18—millions more people in the suburbs only strongly dislike him.
(Upstate, where the fewest people live, Paladino came out ahead, 47-46.)
Here are some other categories of people who told Marist they preferred Cuomo to Paladino: white people, nonwhite people, poor people, middle-income people, rich people, people younger than 45, people 45 and older, men, and women.
