Case StudyCaucuses

Held the line.

How Change Research helped the New Mexico House Democratic Campaign Committee defend its majority across nearly a decade of hard-to-poll districts.

3.6 ptsaverage absolute error across NM polls
9years as NMHDCC's Research Partner
NM HDCC
The Challenge

New Mexico is one of the hardest states in the country to poll. Its electorate runs from dense Albuquerque-area districts to vast rural stretches, and down-ballot races are notoriously difficult to measure with any precision.

The New Mexico House Democratic Campaign Committee, advised by Advanced Legislative Leadership Services, had already built a Democratic majority in the 70-seat chamber. The harder job was keeping it. Every cycle, the committee has to decide which districts to defend and where to spend, and those calls are only as good as the district-level reads behind them.

At that scale, in terrain this tough to survey, the difference between an accurate poll and a noisy one is the difference between putting money into the right seats and the wrong ones.

The Approach

The partnership started small and grew as the results proved out. In 2017-2018, Change Research handled the online components of the caucus’s polling, a battleground poll and a handful of individual district polls, alongside the committee’s live-phone work. As those down-ballot reads proved reliable, the committee expanded the relationship, and by the 2022 cycle it was working with Change Research exclusively.

Today Change Research serves as the committee’s primary research partner, running district-level benchmark and tracking surveys across dozens of targeted seats, statewide polling, and in-depth voter interviews. Every survey is built on voter-file sampling and weighted to likely voters, and each read is translated into targeting and resource-allocation decisions the committee can act on.

The work has deepened over nearly a decade, most recently a statewide survey after the 2024 election and a 2025 qualitative phase using Voices, Change Research’s in-depth interview product, to understand not just what New Mexico voters think but why.

The Results
3.6 ptsAverage Absolute Error, NM Polls
8Districts Called within a Point (2020)
HeldThe Majority (2022 & 2024)
44-26House Majority, 2024

New Mexico’s Democratic majority was built before Change Research came on. Keeping it has been the shared work since. Across the cycles Change Research has served, Democrats have held their majority in the 70-seat chamber, and the committee has relied on those reads to defend the right seats down the stretch.

What makes that possible is accuracy in a state where accuracy is hard to come by. In 2020, Change Research’s polling came within a point of the actual margin in eight legislative districts. Across all of its New Mexico polls, its average absolute error has been 3.6 points, a level of precision that lets committee leadership trust the numbers and act on them.

That combination, deep district-level insight and reliable reads cycle after cycle, is what has made Change Research the committee’s research backbone for nearly a decade.

New Mexico is a very tough place to poll, and down-ballot races are close to impossible. Change Research finds a way, and they've proven remarkably accurate. We've never found anyone who compares.
Leanne Leith
Leanne Leith
Political Director, New Mexico House Democratic Campaign Committee
Success

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