(LifeSiteNews) — A pre-election poll revealed that the New York governor’s race is much closer than expected, with Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in a dead heat against Republican challenger Lee Zeldin.
Surveying 1,198 likely voters in the 2022 general election late last month, Trafalgar Group found that Zeldin, who currently serves in the U.S. House of Representatives, is leading the incumbent governor Hochul 48.4% to 47.6%.
A full 4% of surveyed likely voters are still undecided, and Zeldin’s narrow lead is well within the poll’s 2.9% margin of error, making the race a statistical tie.
The poll results are particularly noteworthy given that 53.6% of the likely voters surveyed were Democrats, 27.5% were Republicans, and 18.9% were affiliated with no party or a third party.
Previous Trafalgar polls on the race showed Gov. Hochul leading Zeldin, though by increasingly smaller margins. Even a collaborative poll between WNYT-TV and SurveyUSA, which showed Hochul leading by 24 percentage points in mid-August, reported that she was only leading Zeldin by 6 percentage points two months later.
In recent remarks to the New York Post, George Pataki, New York’s last Republican governor, stated that the “momentum” is “clearly” on Zeldin’s side.
“The failure of Hochul and the Democrats to deal with crime and change the pro-criminal laws they created has provided the opening,” he added.
In 1994, Pataki famously pulled off an upset victory against incumbent Mario Cuomo, father of Andrew, and served as governor of the Empire State until retiring in 2006.
Gov. Hochul, a self-professed Catholic, announced over $13 million in taxpayer-funded grants for “abortion providers” last month and had publicly called her state a “safe harbor” for abortion shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
“Women who cannot receive the fundamental right to control their body or receive an abortion. They are oppressed. They are welcomed here in the state of New York,” she had said at the time.
The Democratic governor also kept COVID restrictions in place for children at school until August 2022.