Reeling from multiple scandals and faced with crescendoing calls for his resignation, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has managed to retain the support of most voters in his state. But that support appears to come with a time limit attached.
Fifty-five percent of the participants in a Quinnipiac University poll of registered New York State voters said they didn’t think Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, should resign from office. Just 40 percent said that he should.
But by an even wider margin, the state’s voters said they didn’t want the governor to run for re-election next year, according to the poll, which was released on Thursday. Fifty-nine percent said they would not like to see him run again, while just 36 percent said they would.
Democrats were rather split, with 50 percent saying they’d like him to run again and 44 percent saying they wouldn’t.
By an 18-percentage-point margin, New York voters said they didn’t think the governor was honest and trustworthy, the poll found. Seventy-five percent said that he had done something either unethical or illegal when his administration intentionally underreported the number of deaths caused by Covid-19 in New York nursing homes.
Weeks after the cover-up came to light and was detailed in a report from the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, a number of women stepped forward to share accounts of his inappropriate behavior toward them. Mr. Cuomo said on Wednesday that he felt “awful†about his behavior toward his accusers, but that he would not resign.
The compounding scandals have made Mr. Cuomo the second Democratic governor of a major state to become embroiled in controversy this year: In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval rating has dropped precipitously amid frustration with his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and revelations that he had flouted the state’s lockdown rules.
Voters in New York haven’t totally lost faith in Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the virus, however. By a margin of 56 percent to 41 percent, they gave Mr. Cuomo positive marks on this issue, according to the Quinnipiac poll.
But they broadly disapproved of his actions around nursing-home deaths. Among Democratic voters, roughly six in 10 said his actions had been unethical, but far fewer — just 9 percent — said they had been illegal.
Roughly 4 in 5 New York voters said that the women’s allegations against Mr. Cuomo were serious. And by a 2-to-1 margin, voters said he didn’t treat women with the same amount of respect as he treats men (about a quarter of respondents said they weren’t certain either way).
