Journal Poll: Kamala Harris maintains advantage over Donald Trump in New Mexico

SANTA FE — With Election Day just over two weeks away, Kamala Harris has largely maintained her advantage over Donald Trump in this year’s presidential race in New Mexico, a new Journal poll found.

About 50% of registered, likely voters surveyed in the poll said they planned to vote for Harris, or had already voted for her, while 41% said they were voting for Trump.

A previous Journal poll conducted last month found Harris with a lead over Trump of 10 percentage points.

However, that poll featured 7% of voters who said they had not yet decided who they would vote for in the Nov. 5 general election.

The number of undecided voters dropped to 4% in the new poll. An additional 3% of voters surveyed said they would still vote for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign in August and has endorsed Trump but is still on New Mexico’s ballot.

New Mexico has trended increasingly Democratic in recent presidential elections as former President George W. Bush was the last Republican to win the state’s five electoral votes in 2004.

Four years ago, President Joe Biden defeated then-incumbent Trump in New Mexico by 11 percentage points — or roughly 100,000 votes.

With New Mexico drifting away from swing state status, neither Trump nor Harris, who was nominated by Democrats after Biden withdrew from this year’s race in August, has held a campaign stop in the state in the run-up to Election Day.

“New Mexico is a blue state and has been for years now,” said Brian Sanderoff, the president of Albuquerque-based Research & Polling Inc., which conducted the poll.

In the new Journal poll, as in the previous poll, Harris’ advantage over Trump in New Mexico was largely driven by strong support among female voters and those with a college or graduate degree.

While male voters were largely split between the two leading presidential candidates, women voters surveyed were far more likely to support the Democratic U.S. vice president than the Republican ex-president, the Journal poll found.

Harris, if elected, would become the first female president of the United States and has made reproductive rights a key issue in her campaign following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn a landmark abortion ruling.

Trump, for his part, has criticized Biden for his handling of the U.S. economy and has seen an increase in popularity among Hispanic voters, as the new Journal poll found 41% of Hispanic voters surveyed who expressed support for the former president.

That support level among Hispanic voters was higher than it was in the previous poll, and above what most Republican candidates have received in recent New Mexico statewide elections.

“Donald Trump has clearly made inroads with Hispanic voters, but despite that, Kamala Harris has done quite well among Anglo voters to largely offset that,” Sanderoff said.

Regional views and party differences

The new poll found significant, if unsurprising, differences in voters’ views of the two leading presidential candidates by region.

Harris held a significant edge over her opponent in the Albuquerque metro area and in north central New Mexico, with voters in the two regions preferring her over Trump by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

Meanwhile, Trump had a big advantage in the traditionally conservative eastern part of New Mexico and in the northwest corner of the state, with voters more evenly split in the southern part of the state that includes Las Cruces.

As for party affiliation, there were more registered Democrats who expressed support for Trump — about 10% of Democrats surveyed — than Republicans who said they would vote for Harris. But that difference was not enough to offset the fact there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in New Mexico, Sanderoff said.

Among independent voters, or those who declined to state a party affiliation, Harris held a 19-point advantage, the new poll found.

And self-described moderate voters from all political affiliations were far more likely to back Harris than Trump, with 60% of moderates saying they would vote for Harris and 28% saying they planned to back Trump.

Poll methodology

The Journal poll is based on a statewide random sample of 1,024 voters who cast ballots in the 2020 and/or 2022 general election, and a sample of adults who registered to vote since December 2022 and who said they are likely to vote in the upcoming election.

The sample was stratified by race and county and weighted by age, gender, education level, and party affiliation based on traditional voting patterns in New Mexico general elections, to ensure a more representative sample.

The poll was conducted Oct. 10-18 excluding the late afternoon of Oct. 14 (due to the U.S. Senate debate). The voter sample has a margin of error of plus- or minus-3.1 percentage points. The margin of error grows for subsamples.

All interviews were conducted by live, professional interviewers, based in Albuquerque, with multiple callbacks to households that did not initially answer the phone.

Both cellphone numbers (89%) and landlines (11%) of likely general election voters were used.