Courtesy photos
Yvette Herrell, left, and Xochitl Torres Small
Days after an Albuquerque Journal poll showed Republican Yvette Herrell with a 7-point lead in the race to replace Steve Pearce in the U.S. House, another poll shows a different result.
Democrat Xochitl Torres Small led by 1 point, 46 percent to 45 percent, in the poll conducted by Sienna College for The New York Times.
By comparison, Herrell led 48 percent to 41 percent in the Journal poll.
The difference may be in who the two polls sampled. The Times’ poll took a more optimistic view of potential new voters turning out this year who didn’t vote in 2014 or 2016. That was an attempt to account for the energy seen in some recent special elections across the nation.
The Journal, on the other hand, sampled registered voters who cast ballots in 2014 and 2016 and said they were likely to vote this year. So that poll’s model assumes a relatively stable voter turnout trend.
Historically, the Journal’s polls, conducted by Brian Sanderoff’s Research & Polling, Inc., are the most reliable in New Mexico.
But who will vote is “a particularly challenging question this year, since special elections have shown Democrats voting in large numbers,” The Times wrote in a post about its poll. “To estimate the likely electorate, we combine what people say about how likely they are to vote with information about how often they have voted in the past.” You can read more about The Times’ methodology here.
The Times’ Nate Cohn, on Twitter, said The Times poll also had Herrell leading among people who voted in 2014 and 2016, “but we think Torres-Small is up 15 among people who didn’t vote in one of those two races.”
The Times poll sampled 503 people it deemed likely voters between Sept. 13 and 18. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points, meaning the candidates’ actual support could be that much higher or lower than the results showed.
The Journal poll of 405 people who cast ballots in 2014 and 2016 and said they were likely to vote this year was conducted from Sept. 7-13. The poll also has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
How to make sense of it all? Probably wait and see what happens on Election Day.