Siena Research Institute’s final poll of the hotly contested 48th State Senate district race finds Republican Patty Ritchie preserving a razor thin lead she held in a poll one month ago.<\/p>\n
Ritchie leads Democratic incumbent Darrel Aubertine 47 to 43%.\u00a0 I say the margin is razor thin because it’s within the poll’s 4.7% margin of error.\u00a0 Also, 10% of voters still don’t know who they’re going to vote for, which is actually up 2% from last month’s poll.<\/p>\n
This we can draw from today’s poll: this race could go in any direction.\u00a0 A good sign for Ritchie is her strength among independents.\u00a0 She leads Aubertine 47 to 39% among voters with no party affiliation.\u00a0 She’s also holding strong in Aubertine’s home turf of Jefferson County (down by 6%), while she’s clobbering the Senator on her home turf of St. Lawrence County (up by 19%) and inching ahead in Oswego County (up by 6%).<\/p>\n
Aubertine’s struggle is clearly against voters’ perceptions of Albany.\u00a0 He has a 52 to 39% favorability rating, but 80% of voters say New York State is going in the wrong direction.\u00a0 48th district voters may be willing to punish Aubertine for Albany’s dysfunction – 50% prefer someone else to re-electing the Senator.<\/p>\n
You can see the Siena poll cross-tabs here.<\/a><\/p>\n Aubertine has been forcefully making the case to voters that his experience matters, that his knowledge of Albany allows him to deliver for the district.\u00a0 It’s a perilous argument to make, given the historic unpopularity of the state capitol.<\/p>\n The outcome of the race will hinge on whether voters buy Aubertine’s argument, or whether they consider it the precise reason to replace him.<\/p>\n Here are my profiles of Aubertine<\/a> and Ritchie<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Siena Research Institute’s final poll of the hotly contested 48th State Senate district race finds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3103"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3104,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3103\/revisions\/3104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}