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Trump Losing Support in His Main NYC Stronghold, Poll Shows

By Nicholas Rizzi | May 18, 2017 3:36pm
 The majority of Staten Islanders polled disapproved of the job Trump was doing as president.
The majority of Staten Islanders polled disapproved of the job Trump was doing as president.
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DNAinfo/Ben Fractenberg

STATEN ISLAND — President Donald Trump is losing support in the only New York City borough where the majority of voters backed him during the presidential election, a new poll found.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found that 57 percent of Staten Islanders disapproved of the job Trump has been doing in the White House, with 40 percent still behind him — nearly an exact flip of Quinnipiac's February poll, where 57 percent said they approved of him and 36 percent said they didn't.

Four percent of those polled in the most recent survey responded they didn't know if he was doing a good job.

Despite the numbers, some of his biggest supporters here said they're still standing behind the president.

"My support for Donald Trump has not wavered, if anything it increased in the light of all of this resistance for nothing but resistance sake," said Sam Pirozzolo, who made headlines when he put up a giant "T" on his front lawn during the election.

Pirozzolo said Thursday that people he knows haven't stopped supporting Trump in light of recent news reports, but feel frustrated by "the Democrats just refusing to do their jobs."

The poll used random dialers to call 1,019 residents across the city from May 10 to May 16 then used a weighted them to come up with the percentages, according to Quinnipiac's methodology. Staten Island residents made up 7 percent of the weighted sample with an 11.32 percent margin of error, according to the university.

Despite being the city’s Republican stronghold, the borough actually has more registered Democrats, 133,704, compared to 85,750 Republicans.

Still Trump won the majority of votes in the borough with 95,612 voters, or 57 percent, supporting him. He had a higher percentage of votes than President Barack Obama did in 2012 and Sen. John McCain in 2008, according to the Staten Island Advance.

READ MORE: How Every New York City Neighborhood Voted In The 2016 Presidential Election

However, 118,108 of the borough's active voters didn't show up to the voting booth in November, according to the Board of Elections.

Members of political clubs in the North Shore — the only part of Staten Island that Hillary Clinton won — warned the borough's voters would rebel if Trump didn't "Make America Great Again."

"Staten Islanders, they are independent and they will turn on a candidate that fails," Michael Arvanites, president of the North Shore Democratic Club, previously told DNAinfo New York.