I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
In a fundraising appeal sent to supporters ahead of the 2nd quarter fundraising deadline, Republican 3rd Congressional District candidate Tom Mullins bragged that “the most recent Magellan poll has me in a dead heat (43 to 42 percent) with my opponent,” incumbent Democratic congressman Ben Ray Luján.
But that’s not exactly what the poll said. The poll asked: “If the election for U.S. Congress was being held today, and all you knew about the two candidates was that one was a Democrat, and the other was a Republican, for whom would you vote?”‘
And that question was only asked of very small number of voters — 186. The smaller the number of those polled, the larger the “margin of error.” And the larger the margin of error, the less reliable a poll — or a question in the poll — will be. At the time, The Independent warned readers to take the results of the individual congressional district numbers “with a grain of salt.”
This isn’t the first time that some in New Mexico politics have attempted to pass off a generic question of a Democrat and a Republican as a horse-race poll. As The Independent reported in February:
The state Republican Party responded by releasing month-old internal poll showing a generic Republican would beat a generic Democrat 44 percent to 40 percent in a gubernatorial election. That poll was conducted January 25-27 with 500 likely voters and has a 4.38 percent margin of error.
The differences between the PPP poll and the Republican poll are many. PPP polled registered voters, while the internal Republican poll was of likely voters. Most significantly, the Republican numbers were from a generic ballot — that is, no names were used. An internal poll by Republican Steve Pearce in the 2nd Congressional District race showed Pearce up 4 percent, though the generic ballot showed a Republican leading a Democrat by 10 percent.
When asked if the Republican poll used names along with the generic ballot, Republican Party of New Mexico spokesperson Janel Causey told The Independent in an e-mail, “At this point, the only data we are releasing is what we have shared today.”
