Allen Weh is winding up to deliver a knock-out in the 2010 GOP gubernatorial contest, upping his TV buy to a hefty $82,000 a week, but Susana Martinez is hanging on, coming with $51,000 of her own TV this week as she braces herself to block Weh's power punch.

The determined Weh started with about $50,000 in TV a week some six weeks ago and has been chased for a month by the scrappy Martinez, but unless she has raised a lot more money, she is not going to be able to keep pace with the former state GOP chairman. After this week, my media mavens report Weh will have spent $328,000 on the air, compared to $221,000 for Martinez.

Not that TV alone gets you the primary win. With a lower voter turnout than a general election, there's direct mail, free media and voter turnout efforts that can play a larger role, but no one is delusional in these campaigns. They know that Weh going to over $80,000 is probably a prelude to a finish where he takes it to near $100,000 a week. And with no one throwing any nails in front of his pick-up truck, that's what we'd call a lot of unfiltered messaging.

This $82K is going to look like an onslaught to the state. That's because other than Martinez, there are no other heavy candidate media buys out there. The duo has the field to themselves.

DERAILING WEH

If Weh's four rivals choose to go after Weh, what do you attack him for in a GOP primary? We posed that question to several consultants and there were no easy answers.

Several said they would use the electability issue, citing Weh's allegedly limited appeal in a general election in a year when the R's have a decent chance to take the Guv's office. Others said his insider millionaire status and tenure as a former state party chair don't play well in the current climate and that might be something to take him down several notches. As we said, there were no easy answers.

One other thing. Some of the Alligators think Weh could be the first to go negative if his polling shows him hitting the ceiling and Martinez still threatening.

PULLING AWAY EARLY?

As the absentee balloting and early voting begins this week GOP Lt. Guv candidate John Sanchez is basically running unopposed. He is burying his opponents in a wave of TV ads. Here's his second one of the cycle.

Like Weh, Sanchez is basically self-financing.

Former State Rep. Brian Moore and ABQ state Senator Kent Cravens are no slouches, but the money advantage of Sanchez, who is a roofing contractor, is now taking hold. Moore loaned himself $100,000 and can still go up on broadcast television, but by that time will Sanchez already be gone and hiding the ball?

BARELA AND ARIZONA

This is important to the ABQ congressional race. Republican hopeful Jon Barela tells us he is against the anti-immigration law recently signed by the Arizona Governor and which has caused so much opposition in the Hispanic community.

"I have concerns about the Arizona bill..about its applications." He said.

And would one of those concerns be that the law could lead to racial profiling in the "Yes, that would be one of my concerns," he replied.

That statement is not unexpected as support for the Arizona law in the ethnically diverse and moderate ABQ district could knock Barela to the canvas. Even conservative southern GOP congressional hopeful Steve Pearce is hedging on the Arizona law, decrying security at the border, but not saying whether he supports the new measure. That's a sure sign that the issue is political dynamite for the R's.

Barela also spoke to us of his fund-raising efforts, saying we have not mentioned that Dem Rep. Martin Heinrich, who he is challenging, "had a $450,000 head start" on him. OK, we've mentioned it.

THE POLLING GAME

A reader writes of our blog about GOP Guv nominee Allen Weh being the first to go negative with phone polling and says it was actually Susana Martinez who was first with the tactic. These polls are often described as "push polls" in which the caller is given negative and sometimes inaccurate information about one or more candidates to push them away from supporting their rivals. Pollsters for Weh say he was testing negative messages but was not conducting a classic push poll. Meanwhile, our reader says Martinez was apparently unaware of what a push poll is when questioned recently on the radio:

Joe, I've got to correct you. It appears that Susana Martinez was actually the first candidate to conduct a push poll that attacked her Primary opponents. Listen to the attached audio. It's from an interview with KKOB-AM radio a few weeks ago.

The caller says he received a call from a polling company and that the pollster said awful things about every candidate--except Susana. In fact, the pollster said some nice things about her. Hmm.

The best part, however, is how Susana responds: We're not doing a push poll. We don't do polls where someone has to push a button; we do conversational polls.

Apparently, she doesn't understand what a push poll is. She believes a push poll is something where you, uh, push buttons on your phone.