Rasmussen: Obama Leads, Senate Race Close in NM

While my head was lost in the Legislature last week, the Rasmussen organization was polling in New Mexico.

President Obama, according to the poll, would handily defeat both Rick Santorum (55 percent to 37 percent) and Mitt Romney (55 percent to 36 percent.)

That's even stronger for Obama than the last PPP poll here, which was done in mid December. According to that poll, Obama was beating Romney 53 percent to 38 percent. (Santorum apparently wasn't included in that poll. Obama was leading other Republican candidates by similar margins in the PPP match-ups)

PPP is a Democratic polling company. any observers say Rasmussen tilts toward the GOP. But they seem to be on the same page in this state.

It's enough to make you wonder whether New Mexico will still be considered a swing state in the presidential race.

However, the Senate race still looks swingin'.

The new Rasmussen poll shows that the Senate race is a virtual toss-up,showing Democrat Martin Heinrich with a 2 percent advantage over Republican Heather Wilson. When Hector Balderas is named as the Democratic candidate, he and Wilson are tied at 44 percent each.

Rasmussen's automated poll is of  500 likely voters, conducted on February 14. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.5 percentage points.

UPDATE: 4 pm Wednesday Rob over at Capitol Report New Mexico posted some Rasmussen numbers on Gov. Susana Martinez. In a nutshell, she's popular, according to last week's poll. 33 percent of voters polled strongly approve while another 33 percent "somewhat" approve.

While the 94 percent approval rating from Republicans could almost be expected, what interested me is that a majority of Democrats also approve of her performance -- 21 percent strongly and another 32 somewhat. Read all the numbers HERE.