Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has
decried New York's move toward "a tale of two cities,"
is more popular with voters than he was three months ago, but the racial gap is widening, a poll released Wednesday showed.
The
Quinnipiac University poll found the mayor's job approval at 51 percent, with 28 percent disapproving, compared with a
March 18 survey that put his approval-disapproval at 45 percent and 34 percent.
The new mayor's popularity still lags behind his post-inaugural ratings in a Jan. 16 poll, when he scored 53 percent approval and 13 percent disapproval.
Broken down by race, the survey finds the mayor's support greatest among blacks and Hispanics, with black voters liking the job he's doing 66-14 percent, compared with 60-22 percent in March. Hispanic voters approve of him 56-17 percent, up from their March ratings of 47-28 percent.
White voters are almost evenly split, with 41 percent approving and 42 percent disapproving; that compares with a negative 39-45 percent approval score in March.
The 25-point gap between white and black approval compares to a 21-point gap on March 18.
"Black New Yorkers . . . liked him in our last poll and they like him even more now. White voters are still split, creating a widening approval gap," said the poll's assistant director, Maurice Carroll.
"This probably is not the 'tale of two cities' which the mayor envisioned," Carroll said.
The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.