Mayor Giuliani’s approval rating has plummeted dramatically over the past three months, according to a poll taken soon after the Amadou Diallo shooting rattled the city.
The poll by Quinnipiac College found that only 44 percent of New Yorkers gave the mayor good grades on the way he’s handling his job.
Forty-seven percent rated him negatively. Among blacks, the disapproval rating hit 77 percent.
Just three months ago, Giuliani was riding high with a 60 percent positive rating and 33 percent negative rating. Among blacks, he actually had a positive rating of 57 percent.
The poll of 881 city residents was taken Feb. 10-15. Diallo was shot to death by police in the hallway of his Bronx apartment building on Feb. 4.
Political analysts said the poll demonstrates that the shocking incident is taking a heavy political toll on Giuliani – at least for now.
“I think people are genuinely horrified that an innocent person could be gunned down in this way,” said Norman Adler, a veteran Democratic political consultant.
“Clearly, the mayor did not provide an acceptable spin on the story. When he responded at a press conference with all those charts, my reaction was, He doesn’t get it,” Adler said.
“It was not an issue whether or not cops somewhere else did or didn’t use their guns. It was an issue of excessive response in this particular case. It was a symbol of what a lot of New Yorkers think about the police.”
But, Adler added, “it’s too early to tell” if the Diallo shooting would have the same lasting impact on Giuliani that the death of Yankel Rosenbaum in the 1991 Crown Heights riots had on former Mayor David Dinkins, who was haunted by the murder of the yeshiva student in the 1993 mayoral race.
Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac College Polling Institute, noted that Giuliani has bounced back before “so let’s not rule out Rebound Rudy too soon.”
The mayor’s reputation as a leader remains intact, according to the poll, with 81 percent saying he “gets things done” and 73 percent agreeing Giuliani has “strong leadership qualities.”
Still, the latest poll numbers were almost uniformly distressing for the mayor in every other category.
Police brutality was singled out by 14 percent of those polled, who said they’re registered voters, as “the most pressing problem” facing the city today, followed by crime at 13 percent and education at 12 percent.
Sixty percent of those questioned said Giuliani doesn’t work well with other political leaders – almost the precise opposite of Gov. Pataki, who was reported to work well with others by 59 percent in the survey.
And if Giuliani runs for the U.S. Senate next year, 49 percent of New Yorkers said they were “not likely at all” to vote for him. Only 18 percent said they were “very likely” to back the mayor.
Giuliani shrugged off the numbers as a byproduct of being mayor.
“This is a tough job, and that happens,” he said. “People at times agree with what you’re doing. Sometimes more people agree or disagree. In largely the base that I have, however, my approval rating’s still very, very high.”
The three groups that rated the mayor positively were whites, at 63 percent; Republicans at 82 percent and independents at 46 percent.