There is no new polling to report in the New York special congressional race between Republican Jim Tedisco and Democrat Scott Murphy in the Hudson Valley near Albany. But this very close race has changed fundamentally in the past ten days in two important ways.

The first pertains to the stimulus. All along, Democrats have been hitting Tedisco for his failure to get enthusiastically behind the stimulus package. They began by using Tedisco’s essentially non-committal statement of qualified opposition against him. (“I would have voted for it with my amendment to remove the waste.”) At the time, they were wisely using Obama’s popularity within the district as a hammer on one side, and House Republicans’ united opposition to the bill as the anvil against which to strike. If Tedisco claims he would have supported the stimulus, he would look slightly ridiculous, claiming that he would have been the only House Republican to do so.

But now Obama’s popularity is slipping everywhere as his honeymoon ends. And with the revelation of the AIG bonus provisions that his administration placed within the stimulus, Tedisco’s earlier responses that he was “not a speed reader” and could not have voted for a 1,000-page bill hours after its release have proven rather providential for him. The Republicans are now attacking Murphy for his support of what they are calling “the AIG Stimulus.” For this reason, the race is being viewed as an early referendum on the stimulus.

The other big change in the race was Murphy’s statement in a radio interview that he opposes the death penalty, even for terrorists such as the ones who took part in planning 9/11. Republicans believe that this will go over like a lead balloon in a district that is both geographically near to and culturally connected to New York City. They’re probably right, but there is always the danger that they could repeat the embarrassing performance of Jerry Kilgore, the last Republican to make the death penalty the main issue in a major race. He lost for governor of Virginia in 2005, and in no small part because of the ridiculous, dramatic ads he ran on that topic. (I cannot find any of these on YouTube at the moment.) So far, both Tedisco’s people and the NRCC have avoided such excesses.

The election is one week from today. The district leans Republican, but Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand had won there in two consecutive elections.