With Latinos expected to go to voting booths in record numbers this year in the southwestern part of the United States ….  we now see Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson getting about 5% of the vote according to a poll in New Mexico.

The Boston Globe is calling this the “X” factor, but we are calling it the “L” factor.

Third-party candidates could tip vote

We are attributing his 5% to being the former Republican New Mexico governor, and he did quite well with the NM budget.  We also believe that Mitt Romney’s immigration protectionist views will hurt him with Latinos since he is on the record for supporting a view similar to the ousted Senator Russell Pearce’s extreme and draconian immigration policies.

More with regard to  the New Mexico Poll:

In a statewide poll conducted 12 days before the presidential election, Barack Obama still maintains a comfortable lead on Mitt Romney while the former two-term governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, who’s running as the Libertarian Party candidate is polling at 5 percent.

Here are the results of the poll released by the Albuquerque Journal that was conducted on 662 voters in New Mexico between Oct. 23-25 by Research and Polling Inc.:

Obama 50%

Romney 41%

Johnson 5%

Undecided/Don’t Know 5%

The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 3.8 percent.

The numbers show Obama picking up 1 percentage point since the last Journal poll was conducted between Oct. 9-11 while Romney has picked up two points and Johnson has lost one point.

“The reason Mitt Romney is behind in New Mexico is because he is not picking up enough Hispanics and crossover Democrats,” the president of Research and Polling, Brian Sanderoff, said to the Journal, pointing out that in 2004, George W. Bush won nearly 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in New Mexico.

Obama maintains a big lead among Hispanics in the state (68-20) while Romney leads among Anglo voters (56-37). Johnson actually has slightly more support among Hispanics in the poll than Anglos — 5 percent to 4 percent.

Male voters support Johnson at a 7 percent rate, compared to 3 percent for females in New Mexico while Obama leads among men 45-43 and women, 54-39.

As the Romney vs. Obama matchup gets more intense in the final days of the campaign season, Johnson is trying to keep his Libertarian candidacy in the news.

In the past week, he received some attention for appearing on a C-SPAN debate of third-party candidates and declaring, “Waste your vote on me” and actually had a newspaper of respectable size (the Chattanooga Free Press, which has a daily circulation of 70,000) endorse him over Obama and Romney.

But according to a recent article in the New York Times, the Johnson campaign had only about $50,000 in the bank at the end of August, having burned through much of some $350,000 Johnson’s people had raised in small donations that month.

Nonetheless, Johnson staffers announced on Wednesday (Oct. 25) that the campaign launched a 30-second commercial on cable television in selected markets throughout the US, emphasizing Johnson’s call for drastically reducing defense spending and eliminating US military incursions on foreign soil and airspace.