New poll has Pearce leading Wilson by three points

Steve Pearce has a three-point lead over Heather Wilson in the Republican U.S. Senate primary, according to the first poll of the race to be released publicly in months.

The new poll, conducted by SurveyUSA for KOB-TV in Albuquerque, has Pearce leading 49 percent to 46 percent. The survey of 439 likely Republican primary voters was conducted Monday through Wednesday and has a margin of error of 4.8 percent. The last polling released publicly was in January, when an internal state Republican Party poll had Pearce up three points, 38 percent to 35 percent.

The new poll shows that, with three televised debates to go before June 3, the race remains highly competitive. The next debate is Saturday at 7 p.m. in Roswell.

In the new poll, Pearce leads among conservatives by 14 points, while Wilson leads by 17 points among moderates. There’s a 16-point gender gap, with Pearce leading by 11 points among men and Wilson leading by five points among women. Pearce and Wilson are tied among whites, while Pearce has a 16-point lead among Hispanics.

The most glaring differences, however, are geographical. Wilson leads by 25 points in Bernalillo County, while Pearce leads by 22 points in the rest of the state. SurveyUSA estimates that 40 percent of GOP primary voters will come from Bernalillo County and the race will depend on turnout there.

Wilson has been in this position before when heading into the home stretch of campaigns. In 2006, against Democratic opponent Patricia Madrid in the 1st Congressional District, an Albuquerque Journal poll had Wilson trailing by four points days before the election, which she won by 861 votes out of more than 211,000.

Prior to that poll, several other polls had Madrid with larger leads in the final weeks of the campaign. For example, Madrid was up in a Reuters/Zogby poll by nine points a little more than a week before that election. About three weeks before that election, she led Wilson by eight points in a SurveyUSA poll.

The new poll also looked at potential general-election matches between both GOP candidates and Democratic Senate candidate Tom Udall, and found that Udall is retaining the huge leads shown by previous polls. He’s up 60 percent to 36 percent over Pearce and 61 percent to 35 percent over Wilson in the larger survey of 1,827 registered voters, which has a margin of error of 2.3 percent.

In that larger survey, 25 percent of Republicans said they will cross over to vote for Udall, while 10 percent of Democrats said they will cross over to vote for the Republican candidate.