Gov. David Paterson

And you thought the stock market was having a rough year…. This morning’s Marist Poll piles on to the downward trend Governor Paterson has seen in two recent surveys from other polling organizations and shows his position to be getting worse by the week. Here’s the most damning line from the folks up in Poughkeepsie:

Governor Paterson’s approval rating is the lowest approval rating a New York State governor has received in the Marist Poll’s nearly thirty year history of statewide surveys.

Ouch. Paterson’s approval rating is down to 26% — five weeks ago Marist showed it at 46%. By way of c0mparison Spitzer’s and Pataki’s low-water marks were both 30%.

The problems for Paterson are total: Democrats give him only a 30% approval and would much prefer Andrew Cuomo to run for Governor in 2010 (62%-26%). Independents are even tougher on him than Republicans — just 20% of non-affiliated voters think Paterson’s doing a good job versus 26% of Republicans who think he is.

Dig in a little deeper and you find voters basically like David Paterson the man (77% say he’s working hard, 50% says he cares about people) but don’t much care for David Paterson the Governor (53% don’t think he’s a very good leader, 59% think he’s not doing a good job on the budget).

The election is still a long way off and the economy will clearly dictate much of what voters are feeling by then but as Get Real has pointed out over the last two months, Paterson’s only hope is that prominent African-American politicians stick with him, thereby making a Cuomo run difficult (here’s a previous post about that).

If Paterson’s polling problems don’t begin to go away, it’s going to be very hard for the Rangels and Sharptons of the world to stand by and NOT make a move.