The gym at Eva B. Stokely Elementary in Shiprock, New Mexico—where today’s Northern Navajo Agency Council meeting is being held—has the four cardinal directions marked on its walls. That makes it easy to see, early on this crisp, clear morning, that Deb Haaland has arrived from the east. She’s joined by three staffers from her gubernatorial campaign and carrying a few trays of pastries, gifts to add to a long table of food. People moving through the gym recognize President Biden’s former interior secretary, though she doesn’t take that for granted. “Hi,” she says, bright and firm. “I’m Deb Haaland.”

She chats, poses for photos, and stops to talk with health workers at a uranium-testing table. According to a federally funded study, about a quarter of Navajo women have high levels of uranium in their bodies—a result of hundreds of abandoned Cold War-era uranium mines on their land. In 2019, as a congresswoman from New Mexico, Haaland pushed to expand radiation compensation. Now, at 65, she’s running for an even bigger role—governor—and her opponent in the Democratic primary, Sam Bregman, is here to challenge her, creating tension in the gym. Tall, with a circle beard, he wears a blazer, cowboy hat, and cowboy boots. Haaland is in jeans, a paisley blouse, a tan blazer, and silver earrings decorated with a symbol for clouds and rain. As the meeting starts, she grabs a banana, sits with an old friend whose relatives live nearby, and insists she’ll stick to her allotted five minutes. “They are very serious about time,” she says.

It’s day two of four long days on the campaign trail. Over this swing, Haaland will travel about 1,000 miles—through the northeastern mountains that Georgia O’Keeffe painted as dreamlike landscapes, past Santa Fe where spas line the Sangre de Cristo foothills, and south on I-25 alongside salt flats where the first atomic bomb was tested—and where new military devices are still tested today. She’ll hear from farmers worried about water and energy companies ready to drill, and she’ll visit the border with Mexico—borders, in 2026 America, being some of our most contentious places.

New Mexico is a state that feels especially American—caught up in battles over housing and public safety, wrestling with questions about wealth, taxes, and whether fossil fuels will move us forward or overheat our future. It’s also a place that puts America’s 250th birthday into perspective. The American Revolution of 1776 wasn’t the continent’s first successful rebellion. That was the Pueblo Revolt, which erupted here in 1680 when Spanish settlers were driven out by Haaland’s ancestors. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, and if elected, she would be the first Native American woman to become governor—leading a territory that generations before her have managed and cared for.

Generations matter a lot in New Mexico, something Haaland told me she started noticing in 2018, when she was elected to Congress. “I was in a six-way primary,” she remembers, “and some of my opponents would say, ‘I’m a 13th-generation New Mexican,’ or ‘I’m a 17th-generation New Mexican.’ And I thought, I wonder how many generations I am? So I googled ‘generation,’ and then I multiplied and multiplied, because my ancestors came to the Rio Grande Valley in the late 1200s. And in my next speech, I said, ‘I’m Deb Haaland and I’m a 35th-generation New Mexican.’ Everyone just started laughing.”

FINISH LINE
Haaland, a marathon runner, has been campaigning hard ahead of the June Democratic primary and the November election. Margaret Roach Wheeler jacket. David Webb earrings. Tyler Glasses necklace.

New Mexico’s current governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, is a Democrat. Odds are the next one will be too, making the primary a clash of anti-Trump strategies. In her new memoir, A Voice Like Mine, out in June, Haaland frames her journey from an Albuquerque bakery to graduate school at UCLA as a single mom’s adventure in determination.Determination and hard work. She writes about her parents’ divorce and two of her own—one in 1992 and another in 2025—and her new campaign as a fresh start. On the trail, she presents herself as reenergized after Washington, a steady and experienced leader. Meanwhile, Bregman, a county district attorney, has attacked the “radical left” and “MAGA extremists” in law-and-order ads, claiming they’ve taken over politics and “left everyday New Mexicans behind.” Haaland leads in the polls but isn’t taking anything for granted.

At the council meeting, she starts by describing how she felt driving into town along the San Juan River, where the great volcanic plug that gives Shiprock its name sits like a stone sail on the horizon—in Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language, Tsé Bitʼaʼí means “rock with wings.” “I feel like I’m home,” she says, recalling childhood summers spent visiting cousins here. As the council’s clock ticks, she moves quickly. “I was raised in a military family,” she says. Native Americans are more likely to serve in the military than any other group in the US. Haaland’s mother was in the Naval Reserve, and her father, a Norwegian American from Minnesota, was a decorated Marine in Vietnam. Both were lifelong Republicans—but politics, she writes in her memoir, were never discussed at the dinner table. By the time she graduated high school, she’d attended 13 schools.

Haaland talks about her plan to help children read earlier and give teachers the tools they need, tying it to her campaign themes. “Right now, people can’t afford anything,” Haaland says, “and people have to wait six months to see a doctor.”

Next up is Bregman, who announces, “I’m running for governor of the great state of New Mexico.” He thanks those who congratulated him on his son’s success as a third baseman for the Chicago Cubs. “Any Cubs fans here?” Then he introduces a Navajo supporter who outlines Bregman’s positions in Diné. Bregman steps back, smiling, watching the room.

After the council, Haaland heads south to spend the night in Albuquerque. One of her campaign workers has a new Ford pickup with a nice stereo—an F-150 nicknamed Sabrina. The campaign staff shares a playlist for longer drives, ranging from Bad Bunny to Tracy Chapman to Haaland’s pick: Raye Zaragoza, the young singer-songwriter who wrote the protest anthem “Driving to Standing Rock.” They’re traveling hard, sticking to a tight schedule, even though she’s about 20 points ahead of Bregman in polls. “Some of the best political advice I ever got was to run like you’re 20 points behind,” she says.

Haaland’s campaign pulls into an already-crowded church in Las Cruces, a city Forbes called one of the best places to retire in the US, thanks to about 320 days of sun a year and a relatively low cost of living—though everything is getting more expensive, like the temperature. It’s nearly 100 degrees for the second day in a row, and people are taking their seats, “No Kings” T-shirts everywhere. “It’s not supposed to be this hot,” one man says.

Haaland steps to the lectern to speak: “No kings, right?” Applause and cheers. “What a horrible batch of headlines we have to wake up to every morning…. Governors are the first line of defense against the worst policies coming out of this administration. I want to make sure people can afford to live. That we can lower costs, that we can move our state’s clean energy transition forward. That we can get to 100 percent clean energy. That we can ensure utility costs go down as we do that. I want to make sure we raise the minimum wage—$12 is too low.”

In New Mexico, public safety is a big issue—a reason Bregman has police lights flashing in his ads—but Haaland focuses on safety as care. “People don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods,” she says. Heads nod. “We need to make sure law enforcement has the tools they need…. And we need to address the root causes of crime. SubstanceSubstance abuse disorder is, I think, one of those root causes. We need more rehab centers. We need to spend more of our behavioral health money to make sure people can get the help they need when they need it.

Then she wraps it up: “We have to win this election, and that’s why I’m working so hard. The primary is coming up on June 2. We need to show the Republicans that we’re ready to win in November. We scare them in June, and we win in November.” The crowd cheers again.

Later, during the Q&A, she’s asked about her policies on substance abuse. “Just so everyone knows, and I’ve been very open about this,” she says, “I’ve been sober for 30 years. I went to treatment for alcoholism over 30 years ago. And that’s why I believe people can do good in the world. Some people need help to become better citizens, and I want to make sure the state steps up.”

A STITCH IN TIME

“No one person can fix everything,” says Haaland’s daughter, Somah. “But I think she brings a deep sense of care that I’ve never seen in any other politician.” Somah wears a Diotima top and skirt.

Over pie after the event, people agree that Haaland’s answers brought everyone closer. Attendees liked when she talked about her past, showed her vulnerabilities, and remembered the free parenting classes she found advertised at the grocery store when she was a single mother with a baby. “They even had childcare at the time so I could bring my kid with me,” Haaland had said.

Raising a child on her own is central to how Haaland thinks about politics. She keeps coming back to the idea of building a future around young people. It just so happens that Haaland’s daughter, Somah Haaland, now 32 and living in Brooklyn, is visiting later that week. Somah teaches theater to senior citizens in New York and writes poetry. “I was a theater mom for years,” Haaland says of Somah’s childhood. “It’s kind of like, once a theater mom, always a theater mom.” For Somah’s high school graduation, Haaland made a cake shaped like Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

“I was obsessed with Oscar Wilde,” Somah says, “and the cake was shaped like an open book.”

Baking is a big deal for Haaland. “Like, wedding cakes,” Somah explains. “If someone’s getting married, my mom makes the cake, my aunt does the flowers. We’re very DIY.” (Baking was an underreported part of Haaland’s time at the Interior Department: for staff birthdays, she made carrot cake with cream cheese frosting from scratch.)

I meet up with Somah, who uses she/they pronouns, in Manhattan at the Chelsea Hotel. Somah is wearing a hat beaded by their close friend Taylor Uchytil, who is Paiute (“You’ll see Yankee caps around town that she beaded,” Somah says), and several layers of shirts: one designed by Diego Medina, a Piro-Manso-Tiwa artist; another commemorating the Pueblo Revolt; and a third celebrating the Republic of Ireland. “Derry Girls is my favorite TV show,” Somah says. “We share a history of resistance.”

Somah tells me about living in LA for a while, where their mom traded childcare for rent. One day, when Somah was about eight, she and Haaland were collecting signatures outside a supermarket to support a youth theater program that Somah loved and that was threatened by city budget cuts. “So I remember being there with her, me with my little clipboard and pen,” they say. It was Somah’s first experience with angry taxpayers. “Mom has always really empowered me to use my voice in every way possible, and I learned from a young age what’s possible if you speak up and use your willpower.” I ask Somah to give something like an endorsement. “No one person can fix everything,” they say. “But I think she just brings a deep sense of care that I’ve never seen in any other politician.”

“I’m not saying Democrats are perfect… But I feel our values win the day for the most vulnerable—the first people any politician shouldAs we near the halfway point of her four-day campaign tour, I sit down with Haaland at Las Cruces’s Hotel Encanto to talk about what has prepared her to be governor. She discusses her work in Congress to bring attention to missing and murdered Indigenous people. “I mean, 30 women would go missing from a community in just a few months,” she says. We talk about the history of a federal policy around Indian boarding schools—a painful legacy where Native children were taken from their homes and forbidden from speaking their languages in government-run and religious schools. “This happened in our country,” Haaland tells me. “It happened to Native American families and communities, and non-Native people were the ones carrying out this terrible thing.”

She keeps coming back to her experience as head of the Interior Department, which had 70,000 employees before being cut down during the Trump era. She ran to work in D.C. to train for the Boston Marathon, with her security team following along. Running has become a big part of her life. In a 2021 piece for The Boston Globe, she connected the city’s race to her own background: “Traditional foot races in our Pueblo villages honor those who were strong and fast,” she wrote. “I run because my ancestors gave me this ability.”

For Haaland, the past isn’t really in the past. She tells me stories of summers on the pueblo: traditional dancing, her grandfather growing food, her grandmother cooking and canning. Her face lights up when I ask about Somah’s poetry, and she recalls favorite readings from her own college poetry class (she majored in English at the University of New Mexico). When asked about the future of the Democratic Party, she says, “I am going to die a Democrat. It’s going to be on my gravestone. And look, I know people get frustrated with the Democrats. I’m not saying they’re perfect… But I still believe our values win out for the most vulnerable people in our country—the first people any politician should ever think about.”

Morning in Las Cruces, a day that will feel like a 10K gubernatorial listening tour. It starts with a brisk walk through the campus of New Mexico State University, visiting the school’s Autism Diagnostic Center, its energy labs, its STEM center, and a facility exploring ways to reuse brackish water from underground aquifers—a huge opportunity in a state heading into its third year of drought, in a West that is running out of water. Sam Fernald, director of the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute, talks to Haaland about saving water in farming. “One of the biggest problems isn’t that we have less rain,” Fernald tells her. “It’s that we have more evaporation, because temperatures have gone up.”

Haaland asks about deep-root irrigation, something she learned about at Interior. “Yes, that is one of the solutions,” Fernald says. “Otherwise the water evaporates and goes to Texas and the rest of the world, and we want to keep it in New Mexico.” “Absolutely!” Haaland says, laughing.

Another stop is in Santa Teresa, at the border, for a meeting organized by Jerry Pacheco, a businessman who grew up just north of Santa Fe and moved down here in the 1990s. Over sandwiches and PowerPoint presentations, Haaland and her team take notes on proposed industrial facilities. Down here, a community is being built, with housing and parks for those who will work in the factories—some crossing from Juárez to do so. Pacheco sees the militarization of the border as bad for business.

Haaland is focused on creating jobs. “My main concern about New Mexico is making sure our children have opportunities here,” she says. “That’s really our job as the adults in the room—making sure we have opportunities for our children.”

We drive through desert grasslands dotted with huge factories, past US Army Jeeps and soldiers, their dark green uniforms and guns looking out of place among the shrubs and heat-adapted grasses. We pass Project Jupiter, a controversial AI data center that’s been heavily debated.Oracle and OpenAI estimate they will spend up to $165 billion.

Resistance to data centers is becoming increasingly bipartisan in the U.S. Will this one drain the aquifer beneath the border? Will it lower the value of jobs—like a hyper-speed NAFTA—or create plenty of them? Will it change the very idea of the border? No one really knows. “They need 1,500 people,” says Pacheco. That’s to staff the operation.

Sabrina is waiting, and soon Haaland will be driving home to Albuquerque. “So what do you think about the desalination?” Haaland asks Pacheco. “If you can successfully process that brackish water, would it be a big benefit to this area?”

A huge benefit, Pacheco argues. “I’m talking about something that lasts generations. We have so much water. I think a report says you could easily supply water from underground for a hundred years.” Haaland, a veteran of the Green New Deal, stays quiet. Earlier, when I asked her about aquifers, she told me about her fears regarding water, and she spoke about them at the church in Las Cruces. “People ask me what keeps me up at night,” she says. “Climate change does. And it worries me a lot. We don’t have water to waste.”

HIGH DESERT
Haaland served as interior secretary under President Biden. Climate change and the future of her state’s aquifers are always on her mind. “We don’t have water to waste,” she says of New Mexico.

A few days later, the polls still show her ahead—well ahead, in fact—though not yet across the finish line. She gets a package in the mail: a shirt made by Margo Sorrell, a designer she met in Shiprock at the flea market, where, yes, she was campaigning but also shopping, because—well, it’s a particularly great flea market. Haaland likes to highlight Indigenous designers and places. “This really supports the local economy,” she says.

Sam Bregman’s supporters are still around, and her stance on local mining and drilling is far from universally popular among Native Americans or anyone else. As interior secretary, Haaland worked with President Biden on a 20-year ban on new oil and gas leases around Chaco Canyon, an area with historical sites that are meaningful to contemporary Native communities. President Trump is threatening to roll back those protections, a reversal Haaland seems to take seriously. “Right now, Donald Trump is putting one of the most sacred landscapes in our country at risk,” she has declared. “Chaco is not for sale.” There has never been an Indigenous governor in the American West, let alone an Indigenous woman as governor. The question Haaland’s campaign raises is: What might that mean?

Haaland frames representation in terms of thinking across generations. “If it’s not good for our kids, then it shouldn’t happen in our state,” she says. “I think that’s a good way for us to look at things because we’re responsible for future generations. It’s what my ancestors did for me.”

In this story: hair, Erin Brooke Borrego; makeup, Stephanie Ellis.

Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about Deb Haaland potentially running for Governor of New Mexico

BeginnerLevel Questions

Q Who is Deb Haaland
A She is a US Congresswoman from New Mexico and the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet Secretary

Q Is she currently running for Governor of New Mexico
A Not yet As of late 2024 she has not officially announced a campaign but there is strong speculation she will run in 2026

Q Why would her running be historymaking
A If she wins she would be the first Native American woman ever elected Governor of a US state New Mexico has a large Native American population so this would be a major milestone

Q What office is she running for instead
A She is currently the Secretary of the Interior If she runs for Governor she would need to leave that federal job first

IntermediateLevel Questions

Q What are the main reasons people think she will run
A Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is termlimited and cannot run again in 2026 Haaland is the most prominent Democrat from New Mexico and many party leaders and Native American groups are urging her to run

Q What are the biggest challenges she would face
A She would need to explain her record on oil and gas drilling and convince voters that she wants to leave Washington DC to focus on state issues like crime and education

Q How does her record at the Interior Department help or hurt her
A It helps because she has high name recognition and a strong national profile It hurts because some New Mexicans worry she is too focused on federal land policies that restrict oil development which funds the state budget

Q Who might run against her in the Democratic primary
A No major challengers have stepped forward yet but other Democrats like Attorney General Raúl Torrez or state legislators might consider a run if Haaland doesnt enter the race

Advanced Practical Questions

Q Isnt it risky for her to leave a powerful federal job for a state race