Haaland leads race to become first Native American woman governor

Record 358 Indigenous candidates are running for office across the U.S.

Campaign signs line the road to Isleta Pueblo, the Native American tribal community 20 minutes south of downtown Albuquerque, and among the names in next week’s midterm elections and tribal elections later in November one is poised to make history. Deb Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo and the former U.S. interior secretary, is set to become the first Native American woman elected governor of a U.S. state when New Mexico voters cast ballots on 3 November. Recent polling shows her with a comfortable lead over Republican Gregg Hull, a businessman and the longtime mayor of Rio Rancho.

Haaland’s bid reflects the growing power of the Democratic Party in New Mexico, where Democrats control the legislature, hold all top offices and have enacted progressive policies, such as universal childcare, that have been heralded across the country. Her national profile began in 2018, when she was elected to Congress alongside a wave of progressive freshmen including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. In the House, she sponsored the Not Invisible Act, which focused on the epidemic of missing and murdered Native Americans.

After Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, he named Haaland to lead the Interior Department, making her the first Native American to lead a cabinet agency. She oversaw the formation of a missing and murdered unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs and advocated for protecting culturally significant lands, including Chaco Canyon and Bears Ears. She has returned to her home state to run on promises to expand the social safety net, improve healthcare access in rural communities and protect natural resources and sacred lands, and has promised to protect the state’s water, investigate the legacy of New Mexico’s Native American boarding schools and prioritize missing and murdered Indigenous persons cases.

Barack Obama has endorsed her, while Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg traveled to the state to stump for her. Throughout the campaign, Haaland has invoked her experience as a single mother navigating the Medicaid, WIC and Snap programs before attending law school in her 30s. She ran a small business selling salsa early in her career and was still paying off student loans when she was appointed interior secretary; at a recent housing panel with the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, she described trying to apply for a special home loan available to Native Americans while raising a young child.

Haaland said the historic nature of the race is not lost on her, even as the final weeks of campaigning have been hectic. “Sometimes I forget about the fact that I would be the first Native woman,” she said in a recent interview. “I just hope that I can help folks to see that hard work still means something. That anyone can be a leader regardless of where you come from or how much money you do or don’t have.”

The campaign has sparked excitement among New Mexico’s sizable Indigenous community, who make up more than 12% of the state. “I think that there is a lot of excitement,” said Janice Lucero, a member of Isleta Pueblo and a co-founder of the Isleta Pueblo Voters Alliance, speaking from her farm on the Isleta reservation. “I think Deb actually has a lot of influence on the younger generation. She’s able to really reach those folks and really hear the concerns as well in a lot of the communities.”

Ahtza Dawn Chavez, who is Diné/Kewa Pueblo and the executive director of NM Native Vote, a Native-led group focused on getting out the vote, said her group endorsed Haaland soon after she announced her candidacy. “I am a strong believer in the strength of the matriarchs,” Chavez said. “We felt very strongly about having an Indigenous governor, and in particular an Indigenous female governor.”

Jade Begay, who is Tesuque Pueblo/Diné and served as the Native American engagement director for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, said Native women and young Native people are especially excited about Haaland. “They know that she’s qualified for this job. They know that we can trust her as a leader of New Mexico,” Begay said. “And we know we can trust her as someone who will be on the frontlines for New Mexico and defend us from the Trump administration.”

State Senator Angel Charley, who is Laguna/Zuni/Diné and entered politics in 2024 when she ran to represent a district that includes Laguna and Acoma Pueblos but had never previously been filled by a Native woman, said Haaland’s path opened the way. “The first thing that made it feel really possible was seeing Deb Haaland, was seeing Sharice Davids on a national level,” Charley said of Davids, the Native American congresswoman from Kansas.

Haaland is running in an election cycle that is uniquely significant for Native candidates. According to Advance Native Political Leadership, a record-setting 358 Indigenous candidates have or are running for office in local, state and federal elections across the country this year. The country could also see its first Indigenous woman elected to the Senate, if either former Alaska congresswoman Mary Peltola or Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, wins her race.

Native Americans have been able to vote across the entire United States only since the 1960s. In New Mexico, Native Americans won the right to vote in 1948, when Miguel Trujillo, a World War II veteran and Isleta Pueblo tribal member, sued the state. In 2023, New Mexico became the first and only state to implement an updated Native American Voting Rights Act, which gave tribes greater input on polling locations and redistricting.

Many Indigenous voters still face obstacles casting ballots, including vast distances between polling sites on rural reservations, a lack of addresses served by the postal service for mail-in ballots and provisions in some states preventing Native people from using tribal IDs to register to vote. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Charley said, many tribes and Native organizers have adopted new measures to help voters get to the polls, including text alerts, coordinated rides and community events rather than door-knocking in rural areas.

While local groups such as the Isleta Pueblo Voters Alliance and NM Native Vote focus on getting out the Native vote in New Mexico, national coalitions such as the Native Organizers Alliance and Advance Native Political Leadership aim to organize Indigenous voters nationwide.

Haaland’s own organizing history goes back to 2012, when she served as the Native American vote director in New Mexico for Barack Obama’s campaign. “I’ve been a voter activist for the longest time. And I was always trying to help my grandma and my aunties and my mom get out to vote,” she said. That work saw remarkable success in 2020, when an outpouring of voters from the Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona saw the long-red state vote for Biden. Still, Begay said working on the Harris/Walz campaign in 2024 underscored for her “just how deeply under-resourced and overlooked Native voter engagement is,” and she observed that while she has seen deep support for Haaland among Native women, “my criticism and my observation is that Native men are not as excited.”

Haaland has also described her family’s political history as a window into the shifting loyalties of Native voters. Her mother was a registered Republican for the longest time, Haaland said, after a Republican candidate registered the Laguna people in the Indian camp in Winslow where her grandparents worked on the railroad as part of federal assimilation policies. Her mother switched her registration when Haaland ran for lieutenant governor in 2014, in a race Republicans ultimately won. “I’ve worked really hard to help people like my mom understand that our values as Native people align with the Democrats,” Haaland said. “When I think about who’s in the White House right now and the horrible policies that are coming out that are making New Mexicans sicker, poorer and hungrier, those values don’t align with us.”

At the Isleta Pueblo Voters Alliance, Lucero and her colleagues have published a voting workbook that includes worksheets for weighing a candidate’s platform, including by ranking issues such as housing and healthcare and a candidate’s approach to land and water, language and culture, and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people. “We have to think about the future and what’s at stake,” Lucero said. “How are we going to keep sustaining our ways of life?”