Perhaps Gov. Andrew Cuomo is becoming a victim of his own success.

A Quinnipiac University poll this morning found the usual sky-high approval ratings for Cuomo, who has 73 percent of those surveyed approving of the job he’s doing.

But voters in New York, more than four years away from the next presidential election, prefer former Sen. and soon-to-be-former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton make another run in 2016 over Cuomo.

The poll found that 36 percent of state voters want the current governor to run for president, while 39 percent say he shouldn’t run.

A good chunk of voters — 40 percent — say Cuomo’s skill at dealing with Albany will translate well to Washington and that he would be a good president, but 30 percent are undecided.

Clinton, meanwhile, who has a cut new image for herself as the lead foreign affairs official for the Obama administration, gets high marks from the state she represented in the U.S. Senate.

By a margin of 61 percent to 34 percent, voters say she would be a good president.

“New York voters don’t accept ‘father knows best’ when it comes to Gov. Andrew Cuomo for President in 2016. Former governor and current First Father Mario Cuomo has floated the idea, but New Yorkers clearly aren’t ready to talk yet about Andrew Cuomo and the White House in the same breath,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Former Senator and now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leads the 2016 guess list as we do a little mid-summer speculation.”

It is highly unlikely that if Clinton were to throw her hat into the presidential race the next go-around that Cuomo, who served in her husband’s cabinet as HUD secretary for four years, would not seek the White House that year.

Of course, as usual, the usual caveat applies for presidential polling right now: It remains insanely early and we aren’t even out of the current presidential election cycle.

But chatter will rise when Cuomo declares his intentions to run for a second term as governor in 2014. Reporters will ask, ad nauseum, if he plans on serving a full-four year term.

In a race that is actually happening and soon, Clinton’s successor in the Senate, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand is trouncing Republican candidate Wendy Long, the poll found.

Gillibrand leads Long, a judicial activist from Manhattan, by a margin of 57 to 24 percentage points.

Long also continues to suffer from low-name identification: 78 percent of voters say they don’t know enough about her.

And Gillibrand, who a few months ago struggle to stay above water with her approval rating, now has 54 percent of voters saying they approve of the job she is doing.

“In the race for the White House and the U.S. Senate, it looks as if you could color New York blue and throw away the crayon. Both Democratic incumbents, President Barack Obama and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, chalk up seemingly insurmountable leads,” Carroll said.

The telephone poll surveyed 1,779 New York state voters with a margin of error of 2.3 percentage points.

072512 NY GOV + BP

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