{"id":4274,"date":"2011-05-21T10:45:49","date_gmt":"2011-05-21T14:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4274"},"modified":"2011-06-01T08:50:18","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T12:50:18","slug":"ny-26-hochul-corwin-has-the-gop-blown-another-upstate-ny-special-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/05\/21\/ny-26-hochul-corwin-has-the-gop-blown-another-upstate-ny-special-election\/","title":{"rendered":"NY-26 Hochul-Corwin: Has the GOP blown another Upstate NY special election?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Going into the final forty-eight hours of the NY-26 special election, Siena has released a poll <\/a>showing that Democrat Kathy Hochul now leads Republican Jane Corwin by four points.<\/p>\n

That’s just outside the margin of error, so this remains a very tight race.\u00a0 But Hochul is also favored by a number of below-the-fold numbers.<\/p>\n

She leads among independents.\u00a0 Her favorability ratings are much higher than Corwin’s.\u00a0 And Hochul also fares much better among Republicans (12% support) than Corwin preforms among Democrats (8%).<\/p>\n

Hochul’s voters are also more locked in (73% are sure they’re going to vote for her) when compared with Corwin’s (66%)<\/p>\n

During my trip to NY-26 to report on the race — a big chunk of territory stretching from the suburbs of Rochester to the suburbs of Buffalo — I found a lot of discontent with the GOP’s approach.<\/p>\n

Republican leaders in particular were eager to talk — mostly on background — about the fact that Corwin’s campaign was fiercely negative, slow to respond to attacks, and also clumsy on the Medicare reform issue.<\/p>\n

The general consensus was that the candidate in this heavily-conservative district should have campaigned more confidently, more positively, talking about jobs and jobs and more jobs.<\/p>\n

But I think Jane Corwin’s situation was a bit more complicated than that.\u00a0 First, she faced a third-party challenge from Jack Davis, a well-funded, well-known political gadfly who is talking passionately about free trade and outsourcing in a part of the country hit hard by factory closings and the shift of manufacturing to China.<\/p>\n

According to Siena, voters who list jobs as their number one issue still favor Davis by overwhelming margins.\u00a0 He claims 44% of that group compared with 17% apiece for the Republican and Democrat.<\/p>\n

So it may be that the GOP was effectively outflanked from the start on one of their key issues.<\/p>\n

Corwin also ran her campaign at a time when national Republican leaders were floating trial balloons on a controversial overhaul of Medicare.<\/p>\n

Voters now list Medicare as their #1 concern in this race, and only 9% of the folks who hold that view are favoring the Republican.<\/p>\n

Ouch.\u00a0 That’s a hard narrative for Corwin to overcome.<\/p>\n

Corwin faced one other big hurdle in this race:\u00a0 New York is a heavily Democratic state and right now the state’s Democrats are enjoying something of a renaissance.<\/p>\n

They are buoyed by the popularity of Governor Andrew Cuomo — who endorsed Hochul — as well as the high favorability ratings of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.<\/p>\n

This also remains a big union state, which means that politicians like Hochul can mobilize a big Get Out The Vote Effort if a race looks close, which this one does.<\/p>\n

None of this means it’s a done deal.\u00a0 Special elections are notoriously hard to read.\u00a0 Likely voter models are all over the place.<\/p>\n

But after the big GOP debacles of recent years in special elections in NY-20 and NY-23, Republicans themselves are increasingly pessimistic about this race.<\/p>\n

This from Politico<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The [Republican] party has launched an effort to lower expectations. On Friday afternoon, American Crossroads sent out an e-mail to reporters reminding them of the spoiler role Davis played in the race.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s not be silly and ascribe deep ideological meaning to an atypical three-way House race in upstate New York,\u201d wrote spokesman Jonathan Collegio.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But I’m not sure that narrative will work either.\u00a0 The fact that voters in NY-26 now rate Medicare above jobs in this race — and the fact that Republicans have zero traction even on the jobs issue — will resonate as we head into 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Going into the final forty-eight hours of the NY-26 special election, Siena has released a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274"}],"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\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4275,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274\/revisions\/4275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}