A once-comfortable lead for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in New Mexico has all but evaporated in the last three weeks, if a series of surveys from ZiaPoll are accurate.
The newest poll from the company, released Friday, has Clinton leading Republican Donald Trump by 3 percentage points, 46 percent to 43 percent.
The survey of 1,102 likely voters, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, so Clinton’s lead is on the edge of the margin.
Three weeks ago, Clinton led in the company’s polling of New Mexico likely voters by 10 percentage points. Last week she led by 5 points.
The new poll may bolster the claim made by Trump during a campaign event in Albuquerque on Sunday that his internal campaign polling showed the race tied in New Mexico. But the Trump campaign hasn’t released that polling.
In fact, there hasn’t been a lot of publicly released polling in New Mexico because most analysts, at least until recently, have considered it a fairly safe state for Clinton. The Albuquerque Journal plans to release a poll of the race on Sunday. That survey, which is being conducted by the respected New Mexico company Research & Polling Inc., will help clarify the state of the race here.
In the meantime, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com is keeping an eye on New Mexico.
“Polling in New Mexico has been tight enough that we’re now considering it a ‘state to watch,’ although that may reflect an abundance of caution,” he wrote Friday after the new ZiaPoll survey was released.
That new poll found support for Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson dropping in New Mexico to 7 percent on Nov. 1 and 2.
Support for Green candidate Jill Stein was at 1 percent, while 2 percent said they supported another candidate, and 1 percent were undecided.
The poll found Clinton leading among Latinos and women. Trump was winning more Democratic support than Clinton was winning Republican backing. More voters between the ages of 18 and 34 said they were supporting Trump than Clinton.
In the secretary of state race, the poll found Democrat Maggie Toulouse Oliver leading Republican Nora Espinoza by 10 percentage points, though the polling memo didn’t provide actual numbers. “The race for New Mexico Secretary of State looks to be comfortably in Oliver’s hands less than a week before election,” the memo states.
The poll also looked at New Mexicans’ chile preferences. It found that 44 percent prefer green, 24 percent prefer Christmas, and 21 percent prefer red.