One of the side effects of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul last-second rush to approve just over $1 billion in Buffalo Bills stadium subsidies was that there wasn’t much time to poll New York state residents on their opinion of the plan, though one robocall poll back in March did find that downstate residents overwhelmingly opposed it while upstate ones strongly backed it. Now the Siena College Research Institute has done the first polling since Hochul’s actual plan was announced, and it shows that actually every demographic and geographic group hates it:
The poll found 63% of voters opposed the state providing $600 million in funding toward a new stadium, with 24% approving of the deal. … The deal was opposed by 70% of Republican voters, 64% of independent voters and 60% of Democratic voters, according to the poll….
“It’s opposed by at least 55% of every demographic group,” said Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg. … The poll found 68% of upstate voters were against the state’s deal, and only 18% of them approved of it….
Sixty-nine percent of downstate suburban voters were against the deal, while 55% of New York City voters opposed it, the poll said.
In the 13 westernmost counties of the state, a total of 57 voters were polled about the stadium deal. Among them, 65% of them were opposed to it, and 31% approved of the deal.
Those are small numbers of poll respondents, obviously — only 806 people total — but Siena is a legit polling body, if you believe there’s such a thing. The actual poll question was whether respondents approve or disapprove of “NYS contributing $600 million for the new Buffalo Bills stadium,” which isn’t much of a leading question and also undersells the actual value of the stadium subsidy (which also includes $160 million in future state subsidies and $250 million from Erie County), so at the very least it seems clear that support for Hochul’s big NFL giveaway is not exactly super-strong.
This blows a hole in the idea that Hochul’s move was intended to suck up to voters in the run-up to this June’s Democratic primary — in fact, her overall popularity numbers barely changed since last month, despite her support of other more popular measures like temporarily suspending the gas tax, making it look like if anything, the stadium deal cost her support that she might otherwise have gained.
Which leaves only one possibility, really: Hochul’s $1 billion gift to a couple of local fracking billionaires wasn’t motivated to win votes, but is just part of the usual proclivity of local elected officials to give the local rich folks what they want, because their desires must be important, or they wouldn’t be rich, right? (Try not to think too hard about this, or you will never get to be governor of your state.) Or two possibilities, I guess, if you count the possibility that Hochul gave away a billion dollars in public cash in order to secure her husband’s company’s food service contract with the Bills. That seems less likely, honestly — politicians doing things because they benefit the overall billionaire class is way more common than straight-up graft — but you know, it can always be both! Really, it’s hard to see why New Yorkers are opposed to this deal, it sounds great, so long as you own either a football team or a football food service vendor, so whatcha griping about already?
Voters, huh. Like they matter.