Poll: Obama's LI fans, critics evenly split
President Barack Obama speaks at the G20 summit in Toronto, Sunday. (June 27, 2010) Credit: AP
Long Islanders live these days in their own red and blue states of mind.
By far, President Barack Obama elicits the most dramatic divergence in opinion for any of the 14 public figures assessed in a new Newsday/Siena Research Institute poll.
When combined for all of Nassau and Suffolk, Obama's popularity numbers split evenly as he nears midterm - 49 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable, with 4 percent offering no opinion.
But his sources of fans and critics divide into clearly defined, polarized camps.
Among African-American Long Islanders, Obama still enjoys 91 percent favorability. Among Democrats, his favorability hovers at 74 percent. And among those between 18 and 34 years old, it totals 62 percent.
Conversely, the president's "unfavorables" total 71 percent among Republicans, 53 percent among whites - and an unenviable 47 percent among those over 35, according to the poll of 1,003 registered voters over nine days ending last Monday.
Long Island even has a gender gap when it comes to the current White House occupant. Fifty-two percent of women sampled rated Obama favorably - while a mirror-image 51 percent of men rated him unfavorably. (The male-female disparity was also dramatic for Sen. Charles Schumer, who gets 61 percent approval among women and 50 percent among men).
No county or state official or candidate drew that kind of response in the poll.
Siena spokesman Steve Greenberg explained, "A president tends to be much better known than the others. People clearly have opinions about the president. . . . It's not all that dissimilar to the last three years of the [George W.] Bush presidency. Whenever we'd ask about him in a statewide poll, Democrats hated him and Republicans overwhelmingly liked him."
Between the blue and red states of mind exists plenty of white space, when it comes to lesser-known candidacies and positions.
A whopping 84 percent across Long Island, for example, had no opinion to offer on Harry Wilson, Republican-Conservative for state comptroller. And appointed incumbent Thomas DiNapoli, in office for nearly a term, drew a 56 percent "don't know/no opinion." No wonder these two are rushing to define each other - with Wilson portraying DiNapoli as a status-quo hack and DiNapoli Democrats looking to paint Wilson as "Hedge Fund Harry."
