We Are Still Here: Deb Haaland and the Long Road to the Governor's Office

On election night, Deb Haaland celebrated along Route 66 on Laguna Pueblo land. She told the crowd about carrying water from the community spigot and helping her grandfather irrigate his cornfield. "And just off this road, my grandmother was taken away to boarding school," she said. "Yet we are still here."

On November 3, 2026, New Mexico voters elected Haaland governor. A citizen of Laguna Pueblo, she becomes the first Native American woman elected governor of any state. She won about 57 percent of the vote to 43 percent for Republican Gregg Hull, the former mayor of Rio Rancho, in unofficial returns. The Associated Press called the race less than two hours after the polls closed. "In our nation's 250th year, I stand before you as the first Native American woman…" she began, before cheers from hundreds of supporters at the Laguna Pueblo-owned Route 66 Casino Hotel drowned her out. "It is our time," she told them.

A First With a Precise Meaning

The record deserves care. Haaland is the first Native American woman to be elected governor. She is not the first Native governor. Oklahoma elected Johnston Murray, a Chickasaw citizen, in 1950, and Kevin Stitt, a Cherokee Nation citizen, in 2018. What makes New Mexico's choice historic is who she is and how she got there: a Pueblo woman, a woman who raised a child in poverty as a single mother, and an organizer whose career runs straight through the Native movements of the last half century.

Her running mate, Stephanie Garcia Richard, was the first woman and first Latina elected New Mexico's commissioner of public lands. Together they form the first all-woman ticket elected to lead the state, and the first time New Mexico has elected two women of color to its top two offices.

Won Back in 1948

Native New Mexicans could not always vote for anyone. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 made Native Americans U.S. citizens, but New Mexico's constitution still barred "Indians not taxed" from the polls. In 1948, Miguel Trujillo, an Isleta Pueblo teacher and Marine Corps veteran of World War II, sued after he was turned away from registering. In Trujillo v. Garley, a federal court struck down the ban. Arizona's ban fell the same year.

That history links Native and Black Americans. Both fought the same battle for the vote, often against the same tools: literacy tests, residency rules and local officials who decided who counted. Haaland's own grandmother was taken to a federal boarding school, part of a system that took Native children from their families to strip away their languages and nations.

Red Power to the Polls

Modern Native political power was built in the streets before it reached the statehouse. In July 1968, Ojibwe activists including Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt and George Mitchell founded the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis. Like the Black Panther Party in Oakland, AIM began by watching the police in its own neighborhoods. From November 1969 to June 1971, a group calling itself Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island. In 1972, the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan reached Washington. In 1973, AIM members and Oglala Lakota residents held Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, for 71 days.

The movement treated treaties, land and water as political rights, not charity. That idea carried into a new generation. In September 2016, Haaland, then chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico and the first Native woman to chair a state party, drove to North Dakota to stand with the Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Access Pipeline. She spent four days at the camps, cooking green chile and tortillas for the water protectors. "Tribal consultation is the cornerstone of building trust," she said then.

The Rainbow Made Room

The coalition that elected Haaland has deep roots in Black political history. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Jesse Jackson described his Rainbow Coalition as a quilt of "many patches, many pieces, many colors," and he named Native Americans directly:

"The Rainbow is making room for the Native American, the most exploited people of all, a people with the greatest moral claim amongst us. We support them as they seek the restoration of their ancient land and claim amongst us."

Forty-two years later, that idea describes much of election night. A Pueblo woman and a Latina won New Mexico. In Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan, an Ojibwe citizen of the White Earth Nation, became the first Native woman elected to the U.S. Senate. In Texas, a Black and Latino ground game carried Gina Hinojosa to the governorship. Haaland herself pointed to Texas on election night.

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Where the Coalition Voted

The county map shows how that coalition was built. In McKinley County, where 83 percent of residents are Native American, many of them citizens of the Navajo Nation, Haaland won by 45 points, almost 20 points better than the Democratic margin in the 2024 presidential race. In San Juan County, nearly half Native and long a Republican stronghold, Hull still won, but by 22 points rather than the 32-point Republican edge of 2024. In Cibola County, home to Acoma and much of Laguna Pueblo, she won narrowly.

Her widest margins of all came in Taos and Santa Fe Counties in the north, where Hispano and Pueblo communities have lived side by side for centuries. Doña Ana County on the border swung almost 18 points toward her, and Albuquerque's Bernalillo County, the heart of the congressional district she once represented, supplied the raw votes. County results cannot show how individual Native voters cast their ballots, but the pattern matches the coalition she described on election night: Native, Hispano and urban voters moving together.

From the Interior to Santa Fe

In 2018, in a midterm many called a new "Year of the Woman," Haaland and Kansas's Sharice Davids became the first Native American women elected to Congress. In 2021, she became the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, leading the Interior Department, the agency that once ran the boarding schools. There she launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which documented the system's toll and led to President Joe Biden's formal apology in 2024. Eight years later, women led the wave again: an all-woman ticket in New Mexico, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, and Black women such as LaKesha Womack, who flipped North Carolina's 14th District.

As governor she has promised a public health care option, an overhaul of the state's troubled child welfare agency, and a pause on new large data centers until the Legislature sets rules for them. "Somebody has to be the first," she told the AP. "I just don't want to be the last."

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