We depend on your support. Any donation allows us to keep reporting on New Mexico politics.

A new poll shows Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton in a two-way race in New Mexico, but the former Secretary of State edges Trump in the state when third-party candidates are included.

Morning Consult, Sept. 2016

That’s the news from a Morning Consult poll released Thursday. The poll is part of a fifty-state survey released by the organization involving questions from polls throughout August.

The poll shows Trump leading Clinton 42.6 percent to 39.8 percent in a two-way race in New Mexico, with 17.6 percent of respondents saying they don’t know or are undecided.

When Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein are added to the mix, Clinton narrowly leads Trump 35.9 percent to 34.7 percent. Johnson pulls in 13.7 percent while Stein gets 3 percent. In this sample, 12.8 percent don’t know or are undecided.

Interestingly enough, while the poll showed a closer race than past polls in New Mexico, the overall poll shows Clinton with a 332-206 advantage over her Republican opponent in the electoral college vote. Candidates need 270 electoral votes to win.

Both samples have a +/- 4 percent margin of error.

Morning Consult, Sept. 2016

Morning Consult uses its national polling data to develop state-level estimates, so there is no sample size. Like the Washington Post-SurveyMonkey poll released earlier this week, Morning Consult polls users online. Morning Consult says they use “several online vendors.”

The Post-SurveyMonkey poll showed Clinton leading by double-digits in both a two-way and four-way race.

Morning Consult used a statistical process called “multilevel regression and poststratification … to construct state-level estimates from the national survey data” for the latest poll results in all fifty states.

New York Times writer Nate Cohn, who writes about polling and the elections for the newspaper’s The Upshot blog, was surprised by the New Mexico numbers, given the process used by Morning Consult.

Surprised that Morning Consult used MRP (should smooth noisy state data) and still ended up with NM as lean-GOP. https://t.co/41mLWJmzDI — Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) September 8, 2016

If New Mexico were to be close in the presidential race this November, it would reverse a trend from the past two elections. In both 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama easily won the state. But in 2000 and 2004, the vote in New Mexico was very close, going for Democrat Al Gore by just hundreds of votes in 2000 and to Republican George W. Bush by just under 6,000 votes in 2004.