The poll putting Congressman Lee Zeldin a hair ahead of Governor Hochul in the gubernatorial race in New York certainly puts a spring in our step. It is from a pollster called co/efficient and reckons that the Republican candidate is now leading by 45.6 percent to 45.3 percent, with 9.1 percent undecided. It’s up in the wood of the New York Post, and signals that the possibility is building for what would be one of the great upsets in a generation.

We understand how iffy it is. For one thing, three tenths of a percentage point means the result is well within the poll’s margin of error, which is 3.3 percentage points. Plus, too, our Russell Payne reminds us, the pollster has had a big polling miss this year, when it reckoned that Kansans would vote by a margin of 47 percent to 43 percent in favor of allowing legislators to restrict abortion. In the event, the margin was 59 percent to 41 percent for abortion rights.

One other factor on which Mr. Payne cautions is that the poll breaks down self-reported party registration of its respondents as 40 percent Democratic, 33 percent Republican, 19 percent independent, and 8 percent other. In terms of actual party registration in the Empire State, Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one. RealClearPolitics still puts Ms. Hochul ahead by an average of 6.1 points.

With all that, the fact is that the trends have been in Mr. Zeldin’s direction. This is reflected in, among other events, the decision of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball to mark the New York gubernatorial race with an “upset alert.” It has shifted the race to “likely Democratic” from “safe Democratic.” That means that Mr. Sabato still thinks that Ms. Hochul will win but that Mr. Zeldin suddenly looks like he has a path to victory in a Democratic Party controlled state.

Which is music to our ears. Particularly because we tend to focus not on the poll numbers themselves at any given moment but on the direction of change in the polls, which, in our newspaper experience, seem to lag public opinion. It’s almost built into the concept of polling. It suggests to us that a lot can happen in the slightly more than two weeks between now and the election — and it’s the Democrat who is suddenly on the defensive.

It is Ms. Hochul who, according to Politico, is changing her emphasis. Or, as Politico puts it in a story this morning, Ms. Hochul’s reelection strategy “is not working as planned.” She’s spent the summer “pounding Republican opponent Lee Zeldin” for being “anti-abortion” only to discover suddenly that “crime and the economy are crowding out abortion rights.” What in the world was she thinking?

A campaign focused on abortion strikes us as particularly odd in New York, where in recent years the abortion rate has, in parts of the minority community, been running as high as 60 percent. That means that in some parts of the minority community as many as 60 percent of pregnancies not ended by miscarriage are ended by abortion. One doesn’t need Kanye West to illuminate the fact that this is a tragic situation that begs for reform.

As Ms. Hochul turns to the economy, she’s totally without credibility. Inflation, the gasoline prices, the runaway spending, the unconstitutional student loan cancellations, the catastrophic government debt, these are all problems created by President Biden and the Democrats. The Biden inflation is the overriding issue in the election, even at the state level, and Ms. Hochul is trapped as Mr. Zeldin makes what could yet turn out to be his run for glory.