Poll: Bush approval rating hits all-time low in New York

October 5, 2005, 10:13 AM EDT

ALBANY, N.Y. -- President Bush's job approval rating has hit an all-time low in New York with just 29 percent of New York voters giving him favorable marks, a statewide poll reported Wednesday.

Sixty-seven percent of those polled by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute disapproved of how the Republican president was handling his job.

Bush's approval rating was at 35 percent among New York voters in an August poll from the Hamden, Conn.-based polling institute and was at 39 percent in December of last year just after he had won a second term. The president's all-time high approval rating in heavily Democratic New York state _ 82 percent _ came in November of 2001, just two months after the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan.

Another statewide poll out last week from Marist College's Institute for Public Opinion also pegged Bush's job approval rating at a new low _ 33 percent _ among New York voters.

Bush's approval rating among New York Republicans was at 61 percent in the new Quinnipiac poll while it was at 9 percent with Democrats.

Maurice Carroll, director of Quinnipiac's polling institute, noted that support for going to war in Iraq has fallen sharply. Sixty-four percent of New York voters said going to war was the wrong thing to do, up from 52 percent who felt that way about a year ago.

In addition to the war in Iraq, Bush has faced criticism in recent weeks for the federal government's emergency response to Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans.

Quinnipiac's telephone poll of 1,219 registered voters in New York was conducted Sept. 26-Oct. 2 and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.


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