PPP Shows Increasing Leads for Heinrich, Obama

A new poll, by Public Policy Polling, the Democratic polling firm from North Carolina, has Martin Heinrich leading Heather Wilson and Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by margins even wider than the Albuquerque Journal poll showed a few days ago.

In the poll, conducted of 1,122 likely voters in New Mexico between Friday and Sunday, Heinrich would beat Wilson by a margin of 50 percent to 41 percent. Obama would defeat Romney 53 percent to 42 percent.

The Journal poll, conducted by Brian Sanderoff last week, showed Heinrich over Wilson 49 percent to 42 percent and Obama over Romney 45 to 40 percent. So the new PPP poll shows Heinrich's margin 2 percentage points better than Sanderoff's poll, while Obama's margin is 6 points higher than Sanderoff showed.

Although PPP normally includes Libertarian Gary Johnson in its surveys, it didn't this time.

Grains of salt: The poll was conducted on behalf of five environmental groups that back Heinrich (and, I'm assuming Obama.)

The margin of error is 2.9 percent.

In another development in the Senate race, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee has pulled a week's worth of tv ads for Heinrich to use the money in races they consider more competitive. The committee's Republican counterpart recently did the same, pulling ads for Wilson. My story about that is HERE.

UPDATE 5:23 p.m. The state Republican Party was quick to denounce the poll “As we have unfortunately come to expect, PPP’s latest poll once again showed blatant disregard for accountability and accuracy,” said the party's executive director Mark Knoop in a news release. “Rather than sampling the appropriate percentages of registered Democrats and Republicans, PPP increased the percentage of Democrat influence in the poll." Knoop also criticized PPP for not including Johnson. The Journal poll, as other polls have indicated, showed Johnson taking slightly more votes from Romney than from Obama.