NEW YORK — A new internal poll shows a Democratic House candidate is in a dead heat with his Republican challenger in an upstate New York district President Donald Trump won by 20 points in 2024.
The poll, commissioned by Democratic candidate Blake Gendebien’s campaign and conducted by the left-leaning group Impact Research, found Gendebien trailing Republican Anthony Constantino by just one percentage point, 45-44, with 11 percent of voters undecided.
The district is currently represented by outgoing Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who congratulated Constantino on winning the GOP nomination Tuesday after he defeated Republican state Assemblymember Robert Smullen in a nasty primary.
Constantino, the CEO of a sticker company who’s self-funding his campaign with $10 million, earned Trump’s endorsement in April, a blow that proved fatal for Smullen’s primary campaign.
Constantino is an eccentric and passionate supporter of the president and recently recorded an adulatory rap album titled “Thank You President Trump.”
During the primary, he left a threatening voicemail to a constituent in the district, threatened to sue his opponent, whom he referred to as “Slimebob,” and frequently touted the 100-foot-wide Trump sign on top of his Sticker Mule factory, which he erected during Trump’s 2024 campaign. Constantino is also a former boxer.
Luke Martin, a pollster from Impact Research who works for the Gendebien campaign, said the campaign watched the primary in hopes they would face the polarizing Constantino.
“Our research has always shown that a wannabe DC insider like Constantino is very beatable in NY-21, but his rapidly increasing negatives had us concerned that we might lose our shot to run against him if he couldn’t keep it together through the primary,” Martin said in a statement. “The more money he spent, the more we saw his unfavorability tick up in our polls. The data was always clear that Robert Smullen would have been a more competitive Republican candidate for this district.”
After respondents received messaging on the two candidates, Gendebien, a dairy farmer, climbed ahead of Constantino, 49-40, with 11 percent still undecided. The poll quizzed 500 likely general election voters from May 26-31 and had a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.4 percent.
Forty percent of those surveyed said they voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and 58 percent said they voted for Trump. Twenty-three percent of respondents identified as Democrat, 27 percent said they were independents and 46 percent identified as Republicans.
There has been no independent polling of the district, which is one of the largest in the northeast and stretches from the northern Catskills region to the Canadian border. Trump won the district with 60 percent of the vote.
A potential curveball in the general election is whether Smullen, a retired Marine colonel, will continue to run for the seat despite losing the Republican primary. Smullen, who has the backing of the state’s Conservative Party, is on its ballot line in November. That would set up a three-way contest between him, Gendebien and Constantino.
Smullen has not ruled out running as a Conservative Party candidate. He has until Friday, July 3 to decline the ballot line.
Another potential factor to Smullen’s decision making is that the Conservative Party’s chair, Jerry Kassar, is in a bitter, personal feud with Constantino. Kassar is suing Constantino for defamation after Constantino said Kassar threatened to kill him. Kassar told POLITICO it’s up to Smullen whether or not he wants to run on the Conservative line.
“The party itself has no role whatsoever, until an action is taken by the candidate,” Kassar said. “Bob has not indicated to me anything other than what has been public, which is that he’s interested in staying on but is thinking it through and will make a final decision soon.”
Gendebien’s campaign declined to release survey data on a three-way race.
Battleground New York, which works to flip competitive House seats by engaging disaffected voters, said the bruising Smullen-Constantino primary has put Democrats in a winning position.
“With Democrats surging and the race already tied, Republicans in NY-21 couldn’t afford a messy primary and they got one anyway,” said Andrew Grossman, a spokesperson for the group. “They spent the entire primary proving they can’t stand each other, and now they’ve handed voters a November ballot where they can choose between the guy the party hates and the guy the nominee hates.”
