National consumer sentiment is slightly down, but it’s holding steady in New York.
Siena College’s latest quarterly poll shows confidence among upstate consumers stabilized during the third quarter, bucking a nationwide trend. Overall confidence, including current and future confidence, in upstate was 85.3 in the third quarter, little changed from 85.2 in the second quarter.


At 87.7, New York’s overall Index of Consumer Sentiment is 5.5 points below the national Index of 93.2. Siena pollster Doug Lonnstrom: "I'm somewhat surprised by these numbers. New York held up pretty well. We've had a quarter here with turmoil in the stock market. Tariff wars, talk about recession, the political battles, all of that negative news, and yet New York held its own, actually up not quite a point."
Lonnstrom adds New Yorkers’ concerns over costs of food and fuel are down; plans to buy vehicles now at over 26 percent are the highest in survey history, while plans to purchase electronics, furniture, homes and home improvements all are strong.

Breakdown:
- This Siena College Poll was conducted September 3-24, 2019 by random telephone calls to 405 New York adults via landline and cell phones and 403 responses drawn from a proprietary online panel of New Yorkers. Respondent sampling via phone was initiated by asking for the youngest male in the household. The overall results has an overall margin of error of +/- 3.7 percentage points including the design effects resulting from weighting when applied to buying plans and/or the perceived impacts of gas and food prices. As consumer sentiment is expressed as an index number developed after statistical calculations to a series of questions, “margin of error” does not apply to those indices. Telephone sampling was conducted via a stratified dual frame probability sample of landline (ASDE) and cell phone (Dynata) telephone numbers from within New York State weighted to reflect known population patterns. Data from the telephone and web samples were blended and statistically adjusted by age, race/ethnicity and gender to ensure representativeness.