With ten days to Election Day, the Michelle Lujan Grisham campaign released a poll that showed the Democrat leads in the race for governor by 9 percentage points.
The internal poll, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research shows Lujan Grisham leads Steve Pearce 53 percent to 44 percent.
The polling memo says Lujan Grisham “is well positioned to be New Mexico’s next Governor.”
Internal polls should always be taken with a grain of salt because campaigns usually only publicly release those portraying favorable news to their candidate.
According to the poll, 45 percent of likely New Mexico voters have a favorable view of Lujan Grisham, while 37 percent have an unfavorable opinion. Meanwhile, 39 percent have a favorable opinion of Pearce compared to 42 percent with an unfavorable opinion.
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research surveyed 600 likely voters both on landline and by cell phone between Oct. 22 and Oct. 26. The results have a +/- 4 percentage point margin of error, which means either candidates’ numbers can vary by four points in either direction.
A KRQE-TV poll released on Oct. 26 showed Lujan Grisham leading 48 percent to 39 percent.
Republican Party of New Mexico chairman Ryan Cangiolosi called that KRQE poll “a joke” because the poll used an online sample, and because of the high number of undecideds.
“If the Lujan Grisham campaign believes the results of this survey, they are welcome to release their own internal polling to back it up,” Cangiolosi said at the time.
A spokesman for the Lujan Grisham campaign said they hadn’t seen Cangiolosi’s statement and so the release was not in response to his quote.
“However, if he and Steve Pearce have recent polling they want to release we certainly look forward to seeing it,” James Hallinan said.
Pearce campaign spokesman Kevin Sheridan said their internal poll showed a two-point race but did not produce a polling memo, saying that since some media outlets said they would not report on them, the campaign stopped sending them out.
“The [Lujan] Grisham campaign is releasing a doctored internal poll by the firm that predicted Hillary Clinton would be president. All of the Democratic Party behavior is the exact opposite of this poll,” Sheridan said. “The [Lujan] Grisham campaign is nearly 100 percent negative, the lobbyists the [Lujan] Grisham campaign has running their dark money effort are 100 percent negative.”
Lujan Grisham internal poll 10-28-18 by New Mexico Political Report on Scribd
