A new poll released this week by the National Wildlife Federation finds New Mexicans overwhelmingly support strong environmental safeguards and oversight of oil and gas development on public lands.
It comes amid a push by the Trump administration to ramp up drilling with far less regulatory oversight.
The Intermountain West & Dakotas Statewide Survey, conducted by Republican polling firm New Bridge Strategy between March 27 and April 10, asked 400 registered voters in each state of Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming their thoughts on the intersections between public land use and fossil fuel development.
“We see that respondents tell us that they really feel that national public lands provide a wide range of benefits throughout the Western United States,” said Lori Weigel, principal with the firm.
And New Mexicans are no exception. According to the poll, 79% of respondents support keeping fees for oil and gas development on national public lands. That rises to 89% support for a cleanup and restoration mandate after oil and gas companies drill.
Currently, Republicans are using the budget reconciliation process in Congress to push through controversial energy reforms to expand oil and gas leasing on federal land and severely curtail environmental protections to do so.
“Importantly, the bill reduces public participation in a number of places and actually adds fees in order to participate in the process,” said David Willms, associate vice president of public lands for the National Wildlife Federation, on a press call announcing the survey results.
“The results of this polling couldn't be more timely and applicable to a lot of the topics that Congress is going to be talking about [Tuesday] at the [budget] markup in the House Natural Resources Committee and that the administration is moving forward with,” he added.
The Republican-controlled Senate needs to reach a simple majority vote for the bill to become law, rather than the usual 60 votes. The changes are expected to generate billions of dollars in revenue if passed as part of the concurrent resolution on the fiscal year 2025 budget.
Across the board, the poll suggests that a strong majority of New Mexicans reject these rollbacks and even want stricter regulations – favoring industry accountability, protecting local input, and opposing efforts to weaken regulations.
Weigel said that the sentiment isn’t partisan.
“Even among that very conservative MAGA group, we saw that there was opposition to these policy content concepts affecting national public lands,” Weigel said.
In fact, here in New Mexico, 74% of people in the “Make America Great Again” movement oppose using “eminent domain” or the taking of private land to build pipelines meant to transport oil and gas extracted from public lands. Also, 57% oppose proposals to restrict public input.
For the West’s independent voters, 80% overwhelmingly believe that taxpayers spend way too much money on oil and gas cleanups and would like to keep current industry fees in place.
The survey’s margin of error is 4.9%
Similarly, New Bridge Strategy was also the firm behind the 2025 State of the Rockies Conservation in the West Poll, which found widespread political approval of federal environmental agencies.
