Voters polled believe nation is going in the wrong direction, but show no strong allegiance to any national political leader.
Republican Congressional candidate Anne Marie Buerkle (right) makes a point during a debate Oct. 4 with Congressman Dan Maffei. A new Post-Standard/Siena College poll found that Maffei leads Buerkle, 51 percent to 39 percent.U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei leads Republican challenger Anne Marie Buerkle by 12 percentage points in the 25th Congressional District race as the campaign heads into its final two weeks, a new Post-Standard/Siena College Poll shows.
Maffei, D-DeWitt, receives his strongest support from women and voters over age 55, according to the poll, the first independent survey of likely voters in the district.
Central New York voters overwhelmingly said jobs are the top issue this election, and that Maffei is the best candidate to represent them on the issue in Congress.
When asked who they would vote for today, likely voters favored Maffei over Buerkle, 51 percent to 39 percent, the poll found. About 10 percent of the voters were undecided.
“There’s no question that at 51-39, this race is not over,” said Siena pollster Steve Greenberg, noting that undecided voters traditionally favor the challenger. “Would I rather be sitting with a 12-point lead right now? Absolutely.”
The telephone survey of 623 likely voters from across the district was conducted Sunday through Tuesday. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points. The 25th District includes all of Onondaga and Wayne counties, the northern portion of Cayuga County and three towns in Monroe County.
Although Syracuse and Onondaga County are the Democratic stronghold of the district, the poll showed Maffei’s appeal cuts across urban and rural lines into the Republican-leaning western end of the district.
“It was interesting that there was no difference among voters in Onondaga County and the rest of the district,” Greenberg said. “You would have expected Buerkle to do better in Wayne, Cayuga and Monroe counties. For whatever reasons, they are siding with Maffei as much as they do in Onondaga County.”
Buerkle, 59, of Onondaga Hill, a former anti-abortion activist who served one year on the Syracuse Common Council in 1994, receives her strongest support from those who identify with the “tea party,” the poll found.
If elected, she would become the first woman to hold the Syracuse-area congressional seat. But the poll shows she may have trouble connecting with local women. Her support is substantially stronger among men (44 percent) than women (33 percent). Maffei has strong support from both women (55 percent) and men (48 percent),
Greenberg said the size of the gender gap was impressive compared with other congressional races in Upstate New York.
“When I look at Maffei’s 12-point lead, what strikes me is the large gender gap where Maffei is leading by 4 points among men but 22 points among women. It’s a significantly large gender gap.”
In a year when Republicans are widely expected to benefit from a national “wave” election and discontent with the Democratic-controlled Congress, Central New Yorkers appear firmly focused on the two candidates in the local race, Greenberg said.
The Post-Standard/Siena (College) Research Institute Poll found Maffei, 42, of DeWitt, a freshman congressman, is thought of much more favorably by voters (50 percent favorable, 40 percent unfavorable) than Buerkle (33 percent favorable, 41 percent unfavorable).
Maffei is also better known — 10 percent of likely voters were not familiar with him, but 26 percent still don’t know about Buerkle.
“I think the reason you have such heavy unfavorables for her is a lot of the Maffei advertising has been trying to define Buerkle before she has the opportunity to define herself,” Greenberg said. “And to a certain extent they have been successful.”
Both candidates have tried to define each other in debates and campaign ads as extremists on the left and right, out of touch with the average Central New Yorker.
On the issues
So far, 25th District voters are strongly convinced Maffei will do a better job than Buerkle representing them on all six issues they were asked about.
The poll found likely voters by a wide margin consider jobs (44 percent) the top issue in this year’s congressional campaign. The second most important issue is the federal budget deficit, named by 20 percent of respondents.
Maffei received his strongest support — 49 percent — when voters were asked who would best represent their interests on jobs and education. He also scored high on the divisive issue of health care, with 48 percent preferring him to Buerkle (39 percent).
Buerkle received her strongest support when it came to the federal budget deficit and taxes. But in each case voters still favored Maffei, 45 percent to 41 percent.
“When you look at all six issues, one of the things that jumps out at me is that Democrats are much stronger in their beliefs that Maffei will be better on the issues than Republicans are in their beliefs that Buerkle will be better,” Greenberg said.
During the campaign, Maffei and Buerkle have repeatedly argued about the success of the $787 billion economic stimulus program passed by Congress during the most severe days of the Great Recession. Buerkle claims the program was wasteful and did not create a single job.
Voters in the 25th District, however, like President Barack Obama’s proposal (52 percent to 43 percent) to create jobs with a new stimulus package of $50 billion for road and infrastructure improvements.
Beyond the statistics
One person who told The Post-Standard/Siena Poll that he supports a second stimulus was Alan Rowoth, of Syracuse, who was laid off from his job as a computer network manager for the Liverpool Public Library, where he worked for 18 years.
Rowoth, 57, said he has been unable to find a comparable job in his field, and now works delivering drugs and diapers to local nursing homes. He said he is certain about his vote for Maffei, who he considers better equipped to help create jobs in Central New York.
“A lot of the conservatives, not just Ann Marie Buerkle, seem to be pushing the policies that got us into trouble in the first place,” said Rowoth, an enrolled Democrat.
He said Maffei seems “to be on the right side of most issues” he cares about, which included a vote for the stimulus bill.
“The stimulus worked, believe it or not,” Rowoth said. “It just wasn’t enough.”
As for Buerkle, Rowoth said he has not heard what she would do to create jobs: “The two or three ads I have seen have not really talked at all about what she is for. They are all about how Dan Maffei (stinks).”
Among Buerkle supporters, voters are attracted to her message for smaller government, lower taxes and conservative values.
One of them is Ann Lewis, 72, a Republican from Fayetteville. Lewis, who retired from working two jobs as an emergency medical technician by day and nursing home employee by night, wants to see big changes in Congress.
“She is a new face, first of all,” Lewis said of Buerkle. “I feel like we kind of need to get some new people in there. And I like what I’ve heard about her so far.”
Lewis said she, like Buerkle, wants to see Obama’s health care reform program repealed by Congress. She also believes that federal income taxes are too high.
“I’ve really been disappointed in what a lot of them have been doing,” she said of Congress. “I’m not really a tea partier or anything like that. But I like what they are standing for. All of this bailout stuff I don’t think is the right thing to do. We’ve been going in the wrong direction for a long time.”
Obama still popular
On the issue of whether the country is on the right track or wrong direction, 25th District voters agree (57 percent to 33 percent) that the nation is going in the wrong direction, said Greenberg, the Siena pollster. But the voters show no strong allegiance to any particular national political leader.
Obama remains popular in the 25th District, which he won in the 2008 presidential race. He is now viewed favorably by 51 percent of voters in the district, according to the poll.
“It is one of the few districts we have seen of late where the president has a favorable rating,” Greenberg said. Polls in the neighboring 23rd and 24th districts and elsewhere in New York show Obama’s favorability rating in the low 40-percent range.
The district has almost equally unfavorable opinions of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., (61 percent unfavorable) and former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (62 percent unfavorable). Only Congress was viewed more unfavorably, at 67 percent.
The national tea party also is viewed unfavorably (51 percent) in the poll.
Buerkle has used her own internal poll with the National Republican Congressional Committee in an attempt to boost support and raise money for her campaign.
An Oct. 6 polling memo released by the NRCC in Washington claimed that Buerkle was in front, 40 percent to 39 percent, with 21 percent undecided. But both Buerkle and the NRCC declined to make public the poll itself, which would allow for scrutiny of its questions and methodology.
Since her poll was released, an independent group in Washington, American Crossroads, has reserved more than $400,000 in television air time for commercials against Maffei next week. American Crossroads is affiliated with Karl Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff in George W. Bush’s White House.
Washington correspondent Mark Weiner can be reached at mark.weiner@syracuse.com or 571-970-2039.