Schumer with Clinton at a campaign rally. | AP Photo/Seth Wenig New Siena poll finds Clinton, Schumer with big leads in New York

ALBANY — While Donald Trump and his supporters have recently expressed optimism the Republican presidential nominee can carry New York in November, he still has a lot of ground to make up for that to happen.

A poll conducted by the Siena College Research Institute last week found Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leading Trump 51 percent to 30 percent in New York with third-party candidates included, a modest change from the 50 percent to 25 lead she enjoyed in August.


While the two most recent Siena polls aren’t perfectly comparable — last month’s looked at registered voters, while the one released Tuesday deals with likely voters — there were some demographic groups among which Trump showed improvement.

In particular, voters in New York City’s suburbs seem to have warmed to him. Clinton led there, 42 percent to 31 percent in August; the gap has since narrowed to 39 percent to 38 percent.

Trump also appears to be doing slightly better among young voters (those between 18 and 34 years old backed Clinton 51 percent to 18 in August; now they back her 53 percent to 27 percent) and Jewish voters (Clinton’s lead slid from 51 percent to 25 percent in August to 45 percent to 31 percent this month).

But Trump’s support plummeted among low-income earners. In August, people earning less than $50,000 a year backed Clinton 46 percent to 29; her lead among that group now stands at 64 percent to 23 percent, the poll found.

Additionally, Clinton’s lead among African Americans increased from 79 percent to 5 percent last month to 85 percent to 1 percent in the latest poll. Trump is now running fourth among the state’s black electorate, with his 1percent falling short of Libertarian Gary Johnson’s 4 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein’s 3 percent.

The new poll also found that U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer’s lead over Republican challenger Wendy Long has grown from 63 percent to 24 percent in August to 69 percent to 23 percent this month. If undecided voters break the same way as those who have already made up their minds, Schumer is on pace to received 75 percent of the vote in November, passing the modern record of 72.2 percent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand received when she defeated Long in 2012.

In other findings, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s favorability stands at 57 percent, up slightly from the 53 percent favorability rating he enjoyed in August. But voters said they “prefer someone else” to Cuomo in the 2018 gubernatorial race by a margin of 49 percent to 45 percent, up slightly from 47 percent to 46 percent last month.

The Siena poll has a margin of error of plus or minus five percentage points. Siena predicts that this year’s electorate will be 50 percent Democratic, 25 percent Republican, and 21 percent “independent/ other.”

View the poll’s crosstabs here: http://bit.ly/2cXG8e0