Roughly twice as many New Yorkers say they’d rather join the Occupy Wall Street movement than the Tea Party according to a new Siena Research Institute poll out today.

49% of New Yorkers chose OWS when given the option between the two. Only 28% picked the Tea Party. And 16% said they would join neither. (Pollster Steve Greenberg tells me one person surprisingly picked both, and if you look closely at the crosstabs you can see it was a moderate Republican from the suburbs between 18-34.)

When you look at the numbers upstate, the divide shrinks. Only 41 percent of upstate voters would pick OWS, and 36% say they’d pick the Tea Party.

The survey also asks a very pointed question about the OWS protesters. Asking voters which statement of two the most agree with – “they represent the 99 percent of people that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the remaining one percent,” or “they are mostly out-of-work young people copying the protestors in Cairo, with the potential to cause those kinds of riots here.”

By a split of nearly 2 to 1 (58% to 27%), voters picked the former statement, that the OWS protesters represent the “99% of people that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the remaining one percent.”

A couple of other notes from the poll. President Obama defeats all main Republican challengers in hypothetical match-ups in New York State. His favorability went up a little, to 55% to 43%, but his job approval dropped. It is now 38% to 62%.

Siena Poll Crosstabs 10.18.11

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