The latest polls
Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan lead in the races to win the Democratic nomination in the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts respectively, according to a poll in the Sunday Albuquerque Journal.
But their leads aren't insurmountable with sizable blocks of undecided voters in both races.
Heinrich carries an 11-point lead over former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron. Former Health Secretary Michelle Lujan Grisham and Albuquerque attorney Robert Pidcock bring up the rear in the 1st Congressional District race. But the 29 percent of undecided voters should keep everyone guessing right up to the June 3 primary, including the candidates.
In the 3rd, Lujan holds a more tenuous lead -- six points -- over his lead rival in the 3rd, Santa Fe developer Don Wiviott. But an even larger block of undecideds -- 33 percent -- makes this one so tight and unpredictable that predicting a likely winner requires a crystal ball. Former Indian affairs secretary Benny Shendo Jr., Santa Fe County commissioner Harry Montoya, attorney Jon Adams and attorney Rudy Martin are vying for the 3rd District Democratic nomination.
Both races have been marred by scandal or over-the-top assertions in recent days.
In the 1st District race, the Independent wrote recently about a preliminary federal audit that revealed questionable financial practices involving federal money during Vigil-Giron's tenure as Secretary of State. The final audit should be released next week, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission.
And in the 3rd District race Lujan's sexual orientation has become an issue -- some say a distraction -- after Shendo made public statements implying that Lujan is gay at a candidate forum last week. Lujan's campaign has said he is straight, has a girlfriend and that should put the matter to rest. But Shendo has continued to push the point, saying in a lengthy letter Wednesday that Lujan and his parents are engaging in a public deception and that Lujan doesn't have the maturity to be in Congress if he can't own up to who he is. Shendo refused to back down from his statements again on Friday in a KNME interview with the Independent's David Alire Garcia.
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Comments:
Posted 05/27/2008 18:01 with
I have to admit to being genuinely shocked by my fellow Democrats’ responses during Brian Sanderoff’s recent polling in the 1st Congressional District. With Heather Wilson not running for reelection, Democrats have their best chance in decades of winning this seat, but to do so they need to nominate a candidate who would be able to take on Darren White and the Republican attack machine, and come out a winner. But the polling indicates that it’s likely that they will, instead, just nominate another roll-over-and-play-dead candidate and hand the seat right back to the Republicans on a silver platter.
If Sanderoff’s polling is correct, the likely nominee, with support from 34% of those polled, will be one-term former city councilor Martin Heinrich, who stresses his middle-class work ethic, but doesn’t appear to have ever worked a full-time job before in his life. One can only imagine what sort of negative ads the Republican candidate’s campaign would run against a man whose background consists of only four years as a part-time city councilor and a few years as a part-time “consultant”, who failed to obtain a business license for his “consulting business” until after he’d been on City Council for a year.
If Heinrich should stumble in the next week, the #2 contender in the Democratic race appears to be former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron. At least Vigil-Giron has experience that’s on a par with White’s, but as the focus of a probe by the Inspector General of the Federal Elections Assistance Commission regarding an unaccounted for million dollars, and a candidate who was, during a 1990 run for the same congressional seat, referred to by the Almanac of American Politics as “one of the weakest candidates anywhere”, who “lied about having a four-year college degree, billed the state for private trips while in office, defaulted on a student loan” and more, Vigil-Giron would almost undoubtedly be just the Democratic Party’s sacrificial lamb once again.
Of course this is a four-candidate race, but Robert Pidcock, buried at the back of the pack with just 4% in Sanderoff’s poll, has never held a position in government on any level, and is virtually unheard of.
The final candidate in the field is Michelle Lujan Grisham, polling at 10%. Having served in the cabinets of three successive governors, Grisham is the only candidate in the field with the experience, the debating skills and the unimpeachable integrity to be able to withstand the inevitable onslaught of negative campaigning by the Republican candidate, and come out a winner in November. But Democrats seem determined to ignore her credentials and vote instead for a sure loser.
When will they ever learn?