Poll: Politicians Are Worse Than They Used To Be
Remember the good old days.
That’s the message from New Yorkers in a new poll today, which found that more than half of voters say state politicians have less integrity and do not work as hard than their counterparts 40 or 50 years ago.
The Siena College poll found that 54 percent of voters believe New York politicial leaders have less integrity and work ethic than politicians decades ago.
On the issue of intelligence, 30 percent said today’s politicians are less intelligent and 23 percent said they are more intelligent.
“Voters are fairly evenly divided on the issue of politicians’ intelligence. However, they overwhelmingly say that today’s politicians have less integrity, work less hard for their constituents and demonstrate less fairness than New York politicians of 40 or 50 years ago,” said Siena New York pollster Steven Greenberg.
With the turmoil in Albany—from the month-long Senate leadership fight to Gov. David Paterson’s unpopularity to the state’s fiscal woes—the poll found that voters continue to express they want change in state government and new leaders.
Fifty-four percent of voters said they are “completely frustrated with our government and wish we could throw them all out and elect new leaders.” But 40 percent still said “it’s a difficult time” and they are “doing the best they can to improve conditions for all New Yorkers.”
Paterson’s approval rating in the poll was 32 percent, down slightly from last month. It’s the seventh consecutive month where Paterson has had a negative favorability rating, Siena found. In upstate, his approval rating was 27 percent.
The Democratic governor also trails Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in a potential Democratic primary for governor next year. Cuomo beats Paterson 65 percent to 23 percent, the poll found, and among African-American voters, Cuomo leads Paterson, the state’s first African-American governor, by 20 percentage points.
Paterson on Friday ripped the media by suggesting that he’s being unfairly treated because he is black.
Cuomo had a 70 percent favorability rating in the poll, with 52 percent saying they would prefer that he run for governor next year instead of re-election as attorney general.
Only 15 percent of New Yorkers said they would vote for Paterson next year, when he says he will seek a full four-year term.
The Siena poll was conducted Aug. 17-20 by telephone calls to 621 New York registered voters. It has a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points.
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We need a poll to figure this out? We are these days loaded-up in politics with draft-dodgers, BS artists, phonies and nitwits who, unable to find jobs as stage actors and unwilling to struggle to build a career as legitimate businessmen, find a way to finagle political positions wherein they hope to gain a similar name-recognition celebrity as the actor while making for themselves boatloads of ill-gotten money without the honest struggle normally concomitant with the choice of legitimate labor.