Democrat Leads in Poll Before N.Y. Congress Election Today
May 24, 2011, 5:39 PM EDTBy James Rowley and Jonathan D. Salant
(Updates with comment on voter turnout in fourth-fifth paragraphs.)
May 24 (Bloomberg) -- Democrat Kathy Hochul led Republican Jane Corwin by four percentage points in the latest Siena College poll before today’s special election for a U.S. House seat in western New York testing the impact of a national debate over containing Medicare costs.
Hochul, the Erie County clerk, had 42 percent compared with 38 percent for state lawmaker Corwin in the poll of 639 likely voters conducted May 18-20. Buffalo-area industrialist Jack Davis, running on the Tea Party ballot slot, had 12 percent. The poll’s error margin was plus-or-minus 3.9 percentage points.
The race for a seat opened up by a scandal has turned into the first electoral test of the Republican plan to privatize Medicare, the U.S. health plan for the elderly. In the Siena poll, 21 percent of those surveyed identified Medicare as the “single most important issue” determining their vote.
In Erie County in the district’s western section, up to 30 percent of registered voters are expected to go to the polls, based on the day’s turnout pace, county Elections Commissioner Dennis Ward said. The turnout in special elections normally is in the low 20-percent range, he said.
Voters “have been pounded with phone calls and door- knocking,” Ward said. “There are very few people who don’t know what is going on.”
Candidate Attacks
Hochul has tagged Corwin as a candidate of “special interests” who would short-change future Medicare recipients to protect tax breaks for “millionaires and billionaires” and big companies. Corwin has fought back, saying in a debate last week that Hochul’s stance is “another scare tactic on the part of a career politician.”
Davis’s candidacy has added an unpredictable element to the campaign for the seat long held by Republicans, including the late Jack Kemp, the party’s 1996 vice presidential nominee.
A Hochul victory would be “a major upheaval,” sending “a real message to the Republicans in Congress that the Medicare proposal is deadly,” Len Lenihan, the Erie County Democratic chairman, said in an interview.
Boehner, Cantor Visit
The two top House Republicans, Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, visited the district to help Corwin raise money. National party groups and their allies have spent more than $1.6 million to saturate local television with ads.
The special election was forced by the Feb. 9 resignation of Representative Christopher Lee, who last November won a second term with more than 70 percent of the vote. Lee, 47, resigned after Gawker reported that the married lawmaker had e- mailed a bare-chested picture of himself to a woman he had met through the Craigslist website.
The campaign to replace him drew little national attention until Hochul, 52, spotlighted Corwin’s endorsement of the Republican plan to reduce government debt by privatizing Medicare for people who turn 65 starting in 2022. Under the plan by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, these future beneficiaries would receive a government subsidy to help them buy private health insurance.
Cuts Opposed
An earlier survey by Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y., conducted April 26-27, found that likely voters in the district opposed cutting Medicare and Social Security, 59 percent to 38 percent.
Hochul has been “gaining traction” on the Medicare issue, said Siena pollster Steven Greenberg.
Cantor yesterday disputed the political significance of the special election, saying Davis’s third-party candidacy has made “the race a lot closer than anyone had thought.”
The outcome can’t “be seen as a signal” of voter disapproval of the Republican Medicare plan, he told reporters in Washington. “The best signal you can take is the 63 seats that we picked up” in last November’s election, he said.
Bill Reilich, chairman of the Republican Party in Monroe County, which includes Rochester, sees what has happened in the House campaign differently.
“This is a tight race” because “Democrats were successful in spinning the Medicare message of fear and voters heard that,” Reilich said in a May 17 telephone interview.
Whatever the outcome, the election “raises Medicare as an issue to a higher stage than it was,” Bruce Altschuler, a political scientist at State University of New York at Oswego, said in an interview.
The 26th House district stretches east from the Buffalo area, through most of four rural counties and into Rochester’s suburbs. Republican John McCain carried it against Democrat Barack Obama, 52 percent to 46 percent, in the 2008 presidential race.
The Medicare plan dominating the current race was part of the 2012 budget resolution passed April 15 by the Republican-run House. The measure also would cut the top tax rate for wealthy Americans and corporations to 25 percent from 35 percent.
--Editors: Laurie Asseo, Mark Silva
To contact the reporters on this story: James Rowley in Greece, N.Y., at jarowley@bloomberg.net; Jonathan D. Salant in Washington at jsalant@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net.
