Oct. 22—SANTA FE — Martin Heinrich can count on strong support from female voters to hold off a challenge from Nella Domenici in the race for the U.S. Senate seat he has held since 2013, a new Journal poll shows.
Heinrich, a Democrat and former Albuquerque city councilman, received support from 51% of voters surveyed, while 40% said they would vote for Domenici, a Republican who has pumped more than $2 million into her campaign in the form of loans .
Heinrich’s 11-point lead in the poll is slightly smaller than his lead in a poll last month. That showed him 50%-38% over Domenici.
But the Republican challenger, the daughter of former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, is struggling to make up ground against the incumbent amid a steady stream of attacks on her position on abortion.
Domenici has said she would not support a federal abortion ban because she believes abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”
However, Heinrich said during a recent televised debate on KOAT TV that Domenici, if elected, would likely vote for a Republican leader who supports a nationwide abortion ban in the U.S. Senate.
That prompted a sharp response from Domenici, who described the comment as “the most sexist remark you could ever hear from a U.S. senator.”
The two candidates also discussed border security, crime, inflation and their respective obligations to New Mexico.
Domenici has tried to portray Heinrich as a “radical” Democrat out of touch with the daily struggles of most of the state’s residents.
“My name still carries an enormous amount of mutual respect,” Domenici said during the recent debate, recalling her father’s legacy.
But Heinrich said he regularly meets with all kinds of New Mexicans, dismissing Domenici’s criticism that many businesspeople have difficulty securing meetings with him. Heinrich also says his family is fully invested in Albuquerque, as he and his wife no longer own a home in Maryland that they purchased in 2013.
“I come home almost every weekend because this is the place that makes me happy,” Heinrich said during the recent debate.
For her part, Domenici has defended her New Mexico roots despite living on the East Coast for years. She says she and her husband have owned a home in Santa Fe for 20 years and helped start a state charter school program. State voting records show Domenici voted for the first time in New Mexico’s June 2020 election.
Brian Sanderoff, the president of Albuquerque-based Research & Polling Inc., which conducted the poll, said Heinrich faces a tougher reelection campaign than in 2018, when he easily defeated two general election opponents.
“Nella Domenici is running a formidable race, but there is still a big gap between the two candidates,” Sanderoff said.
“It is difficult to unseat a two-term U.S. Democratic senator in a blue-leaning state,” he added.
Gender gap and regional attitudes
Similar to this year’s presidential election, the new poll found that female voters are significantly more likely than male voters to support the Democratic candidate in the U.S. Senate race.
Overall, 54% of female voters surveyed said they planned to vote for Heinrich, or had already voted for him, while 37% said they planned to vote for Domenici.
Heinrich also led his opponent among male voters, although the division was much smaller.
“We certainly have a gender gap, but Heinrich is leading among both male and female voters,” Sanderoff said.
There was also a significant difference in voters’ views of the two candidates based on education level, with voters with a college or graduate degree supporting Heinrich by a wide margin, the new Journal poll found.
For her part, Domenici had relatively strong support for a Republican candidate among New Mexico’s Hispanic voters, a group she has targeted in this year’s campaign.
She also had strong leads over Heinrich in eastern New Mexico and the northwest corner of the state.
But Heinrich held commanding leads in the Albuquerque Metro area and in traditionally Democratic north-central New Mexico, leading Domenici by wide margins in those regions.
Although the new poll showed Domenici receiving slightly more support from Democratic voters than Heinrich did from Republican voters, the difference was not enough to offset the fact that there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in New Mexico.
Additionally, Sanderoff said, there appears to be little ticket-splitting, meaning most voters plan to cast their ballots for candidates from the same party in the presidential and U.S. Senate races.
Poll methodology
The Journal poll is based on a random sample of 1,024 voters statewide who cast ballots in the 2020 and/or 2022 general elections, and a sample of adults who have registered to vote since December 2022 and who said they are likely to vote in the upcoming elections. .
The sample was stratified by race and county and weighted by age, gender, education level, and party affiliation based on traditional voting patterns in New Mexico general elections, to ensure a more representative sample.
The poll was conducted from October 10 to 18, with the exception of the late afternoon of October 14 (due to the US Senate debate). The voter sample has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The margin of error grows for subsamples.
All interviews were conducted by live, professional interviewers based in Albuquerque, with multiple return calls to households that did not initially answer the phone.
Both mobile phone numbers (89%) and landlines (11%) of likely voters in the general election were used.
