A new poll examining the job approval ratings of every governor and U.S. senator showed Gov. Susana Martinez near the bottom of the rankings and both of the state’s senators at mid-pack.
That poll comes from Morning Consult, a website that regularly releases polls, most notably on President Donald Trump’s approval ratings, and is the website’s first approval ratings poll since the 2016 general election.
The Morning Consult poll showed 43 percent of New Mexican registered voters approve of Martinez’s job performance while 48 percent disapprove. Martinez ranks 41st in approval ratings among governors. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster was not included in the rankings because he took over for Nikki Haley, who is the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Martinez’s approval ratings fell from last September, when 50 percent of registered New Mexico voters approved of Martinez’s job performance compared to 45 percent who disapproved.
Those numbers including polling between May and early September of 2016.
As for New Mexico’s senators, 16 percent of the state’s registered voters had no opinion on Tom Udall’s job performance and 21 percent had no opinion on Martin Heinrich’s job performance. Both are Democrats.
Of those who had an opinion, more approved of their job performance than disapproved. For Udall, it broke down to 53 percent who approved and 31 percent who disapproved, while for Heinrich 48 percent approved compared to 31 percent who disapproved.
The numbers were not very different from the last Morning Consult poll for the senators’ approval ratings.
Heinrich is up for reelection in 2018.
Martinez is far ahead of the least popular governors—just 25 percent of New Jersey residents approved of Chris Christie’s job performance, followed closely by Sam Brownback of Kansas at 27 percent and Dan Malloy of Connecticut at 29 percent. Christie and Brownback are Republicans while Malloy is a Democrat.
The most popular governor is Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, at 75 percent approval, followed by Larry Hogan of Maryland, at 73 percent. Both are Republicans, and are the only governors to clear the 70 percent threshold.
Robert Bentley, the Alabama Republican who resigned Monday, had the support of 44 percent of his state’s residents. Bentley resigned ahead of likely impeachment because of two campaign finance violations discovered through an extramarital affair he had. Many of the most lurid details came in the past few days after the poll was conducted.
Morning Consult conducts national daily online polls. The numbers for senators and governors come from between January 2017 and March 2017.
The results in New Mexico had a 4 percent margin of error.
These types of 50-state polls that are then broken down into individual states can be useful, though FiveThirtyEight Editor Nate Silver wrote last September about how they are not the same as 50 individual state polls.
