New York Attorney General Letitia James still leads her Republican challenger by double digits, but a new Siena University poll shows that margin narrowing, and the 42-year-old former federal prosecutor is betting she can close the gap before November.
James holds a 52-to-39 percent lead over Saritha Komatireddy among likely voters, the New York Post reported Wednesday, citing the latest Siena University survey. That 13-point margin is down from 18 points in August, when James led 54 to 36 percent. The shift amounts to a five-point tightening in roughly five weeks, movement that, in a state where Republicans rarely compete for statewide office, has drawn attention to a race most observers had written off.
The poll surveyed 1,144 likely New York voters between September 11 and 17 by mobile phone, landline, and text. Its margin of error is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
Siena pollster Steve Greenberg framed the race as James's to lose, but acknowledged the challenger is gaining ground from a low baseline. Two-thirds of likely voters told pollsters they had either never heard of Komatireddy or did not know enough about her to form an opinion. That anonymity is both her ceiling and, potentially, her opportunity: every new voter who learns her name is a voter James has to defend.
Greenberg put it bluntly:
"Unless Komatireddy can find a way to get more known to likely voters in the next few weeks, it appears that James is in a strong position heading into the home stretch of the campaign."
Fox News reported that neither campaign responded to a request for comment on the poll results, a silence that, on Komatireddy's side, may reflect a lean operation still building name recognition, and on James's side, may signal a reluctance to amplify a tightening narrative.
Komatireddy, 42, is running an aggressive campaign built on public safety, a message that resonates in a state where crime remains a top-of-mind issue for voters outside Manhattan's progressive corridors. She previously served as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn's Eastern District of New York, where she handled cases involving international terrorism, cybercrime, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and public corruption.
On Tuesday, she held a press conference outside the Intrepid Museum and vowed to crack down on homeless encampments and get the mentally ill off the streets. The message was aimed squarely at voters tired of stepping over disorder on their way to work, the kind of quality-of-life issue that Democratic leadership in New York has struggled to address. She has also criticized James for investigating officers involved in stopping a Times Square attacker rather than addressing the mental health failures that put dangerous people on the street in the first place.
And in a new campaign ad, Komatireddy secured an endorsement from Migdalia Martinez, a Bronx mother whose 12-year-old son Jacob was killed by a stray bullet in July. That kind of endorsement, a grieving mother choosing the Republican challenger over the incumbent Democrat in deep-blue New York, carries weight that no amount of ad spending can manufacture. It speaks to a failure of public safety that voters can see and feel in their own neighborhoods.
James, 67, is seeking a third term as attorney general after first winning the office in 2019. Before that, she served as New York City's public advocate and as a Brooklyn councilwoman. She built a national profile through high-visibility legal actions, she prosecuted Donald Trump and his company, and she commissioned the sexual misconduct probe of former Governor Andrew Cuomo that led to his resignation in 2021. Cuomo denied wrongdoing.
On Tuesday, the same day Komatireddy was talking about homeless encampments and public safety, James filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging it provided energy companies $1.4 billion in funds to cancel four offshore wind projects. The contrast in priorities was hard to miss. One candidate spent her Tuesday talking about crime victims and disorder on the streets. The other filed a lawsuit about wind turbines.
James's tenure has drawn scrutiny beyond the campaign trail. Federal officials have frozen funding for New York's Medicaid fraud unit, citing what they described as a collapse in criminal enforcement under her leadership. That funding freeze represents a direct federal rebuke of the office James runs, the kind of institutional failure that voters may not hear about from Albany but that affects real dollars and real accountability.
Separately, federal prosecutors have met with a whistleblower who claims James's office ordered staff to target Trump, an allegation that, if substantiated, would raise serious questions about whether the attorney general's office was weaponized for political purposes rather than used to enforce the law impartially.
For context, the same Siena poll measured the state comptroller race. Democratic incumbent Tom DiNapoli, who has held the office since 2007, leads Republican challenger Joseph Hernandez 56 to 33 percent, a 23-point margin. James's 13-point lead is ten points tighter than what a fellow statewide Democratic incumbent is pulling. In New York, where Democrats enjoy enormous registration advantages, that gap is notable.
DiNapoli's wider margin suggests the tightening in the AG race is specific to James, not a generic shift toward Republicans across the board. Voters who are comfortable reelecting DiNapoli by a wide margin are less comfortable giving James the same cushion. That distinction matters. It points to something about James herself, her record, her priorities, her profile, that is costing her support relative to a generic Democratic incumbent.
Komatireddy still faces long odds. A 13-point deficit with weeks to go, against an incumbent with near-universal name recognition, in a state where Democrats dominate statewide races, is a steep climb. But five points of movement in five weeks, driven largely by a candidate most voters still cannot name, suggests the race is not frozen. If Komatireddy can break through the name-recognition barrier, the underlying conditions favor continued tightening: voters concerned about crime, an incumbent focused on national political battles, and a growing list of internal controversies inside the AG's office.
Voters in New York may not be ready to elect a Republican attorney general. But when a Bronx mother who lost her child to street violence endorses the challenger, and the incumbent spends her days suing over wind farms, the gap between the two candidates' priorities tells its own story.
