Deb Haaland Is Racing Against Her Own Record

If anyone knows how to run a race, it’s Deb Haaland. She descends from Pueblo runners who delivered secret messages to stage a victorious revolt against the Spaniards in 1680. As the first Native American cabinet secretary, she ran two distinct footraces—a marathon and ultramarathon—each bookending her historic appointment. Now back in New Mexico, the Laguna Pueblo Democrat is in the final stretch of a 20-month-long gubernatorial campaign. If she wins, Haaland will make history again as the first Native American woman governor in the country. More profoundly, she would become the first Pueblo citizen to govern the modern state of New Mexico, the land of her Indigenous ancestors. 

At 65, Haaland has led a life defined by endurance. Long before the world knew her as Biden’s secretary of the interior, she was a military kid and a struggling single mom relying on food stamps while accumulating so much college debt she’s still paying it off. After failing the bar exam in her mid-forties, she found a different calling in politics.

Now the late bloomer, known across Indian Country as “Auntie Deb,” has leveraged her national star power to amass a record-breaking war chest and a roughly 6-point lead over her Republican opponent, Gregg Hull. But beneath her family-driven TV ads lies a more complicated political picture: a progressive icon whose acceptance of contributions tied to a controversial AI data center and the fossil fuel industry has raised questions about the environmental commitments that helped propel her to national prominence.   

Reflecting on the historic possibility of becoming governor, Haaland spoke of her Pueblo grandparents who kept traditions alive despite federal efforts to erase them. “I never dreamed I would be running for anything, much less governor,” she told me in a brief interview the Friday before Election Day. “And I don’t think my grandparents thought about that either.” 

Governing her ancestral homeland will demand something different: reconciling the state’s dependence on fossil fuels with its environmental future.

In a race to govern New Mexico, the country’s second-largest oil producer, Haaland has all but abandoned the language of “keep it in the ground.” 

Haaland’s political prospects looked very different in 2018. Back then, she emerged as a progressive underdog riding a wave of Indigenous visibility after the anti-pipeline demonstrations at Standing Rock. She had driven to the camps, Instagramming #NoDAPL along the way, and cooked tortillas over an open fire to feed hungry Water Protectors. Back in New Mexico, as chair of the state Democratic Party, she led the withdrawal of party funds from Wells Fargo over the banks’ financial ties to the Dakota Access Pipeline. White Albuquerque progressives and a groundswell of Native voters turned out to make her one of the first Native women elected to Congress. Once in Washington, she championed the Green New Deal and later won re-election on a renewed pledge to reject fossil-fuel money.

But in a race to govern New Mexico, the country’s second-largest oil producer, Haaland has all but abandoned the language of “keep it in the ground.” 

Since announcing her gubernatorial bid, she has collected tens of thousands of dollars from oil industry interests, including at least $24,800 directly from Energy Transfer LP. The Dallas-based company owns the Dakota Access Pipeline and helped bankroll the militarized response to the Indigenous-led resistance at Standing Rock. This week marks 10 years since police and National Guardsmen rolled armored vehicles across the North Dakota prairie to clear a protest camp in the pipeline’s path. Almost 150 people were arrested that day, among them, Elder culture bearers.

Energy Transfer also reportedly gave $250,000 to Affordable NM, an independent political action committee that has spent millions on ads attacking Gregg Hull.  

Now the pipeline developer is the exclusive fuel provider for Project Jupiter, a controversial AI data center under development in southern New Mexico. 

In September, campaign finance reports revealed that Haaland had accepted more than $100,000 in contributions from Oracle, its executives, and others connected to Project Jupiter. The tech giant, alongside partner OpenAI, is driving the $165 billion megacampus.

“I believe I can walk and chew gum at the same time,”  Haaland said.

The development is anticipated to release 10.1 million tons of annual carbon emissions, equal to putting 2 million more gas-powered cars on the road, while consuming millions of gallons of groundwater in the already water-stressed Chihuahua Desert. Environmental concerns have fueled fierce opposition. A state Supreme Court stay temporarily froze the data center’s water permits in August, and other litigation against the project is ongoing.

Protesters who had already mobilized over Project Jupiter’s lack of transparency instantly petitioned Haaland to return the money. At a press conference, standing behind a podium bearing the words Agua es Vida—Water is Life—she promised a Day One moratorium on new data centers if elected. But the ban would not affect Oracle’s 1,400-acre hyperscale data center, where construction began earlier this year. 

Haaland declined to commit to returning the contributions, lamenting the cost of political campaigns. “I believe I can walk and chew gum at the same time,” she said. 

Tensions have lingered ever since. 

In mid-October, days before early in-person voting began, Haaland walked out of her own community forum after being confronted again about the donations. 

Among those most outspoken was 32-year-old Isaac Lira, who was born and raised in Sunland Park, five or so miles east from where Project Jupiter is being built. “Return the money,” he demanded, describing a childhood hauling drinking water because the local wells were unreliable. “Build trust with your people,” he added before he was asked to leave. 

Opposition to large-scale data centers extends well beyond southern New Mexico. An Albuquerque Journal poll found that 65 percent of likely voters opposed their development, while three-quarters supported a statewide moratorium. But the political backlash against Haaland has been harder to gauge: A petition demanding she return the money has attracted fewer than 1,000 signatures. 

“I think she’s been given a pass by the Democratic left,” said Joe Monahan, whose political blog is one of the state’s most closely read. He had pointed to a double standard during the Democratic primary: Progressives criticized Haaland’s challenger, Sam Bregman, for courting oil-industry donors in Texas, even as campaign finance reports showed Haaland had accepted two $6,200 contributions from Exxon—one during the primary and one afterward.  

Monahan believes left-leaning voters are reluctant to abandon a candidate they have long championed, particularly when the alternative is a Republican. But he cautioned that once in office, Haaland might prove less ideologically progressive than her supporters expect.

On a Saturday morning in August, just before the high desert heat set in, Haaland appeared before about two dozen supporters in Santa Fe. Thirty miles north, the 10-day-old Frijoles Fire had been consuming the dense, dry forest of the Pecos Wilderness at a rate of about 1,000 acres a day. Earlier in the week, the smoke had grown so thick that the surrounding mountain ranges disappeared from view. That night, it even halted a performance of Madam Butterfly mid-opera. 

I had gone to the rally wondering whether Haaland would address the fire. Instead, she moved through familiar campaign talking points, making no mention of the growing threat. One proposal felt especially out of step: “Every Child Outdoors,” an initiative to integrate nature-based learning into New Mexico’s public schools, though pitched in a city where even recess had been driven indoors. 

Noticeably muted from Haaland’s campaign has been an explicit discussion of climate change. She is hardly alone. Across the country, Democrats have increasingly traded green messaging for appeals to energy affordability, a retreat that Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has criticized as “climate hushing.”

But Haaland’s environmental commitments remain evident in places like Chaco Canyon, even as her campaign accepts contributions from Big Oil and Big Tech—and while she tells voters she is fighting “corporate polluters” in fundraising reels like one filmed at Chaco this summer. 

“That’s a big deal, to preserve all those canyons and not destroy them like Trump wants to.”

The ancient Pueblo landscape in northwestern New Mexico is at the center of another environmental fight: The Trump administration has proposed reversing protections against new oil and gas leasing on surrounding federal lands, including areas targeted for fracking. Those protections were established during Haaland’s tenure as interior secretary, making the threat to undo them consequential to her legacy. 

But Chaco’s significance runs deeper than politics. For Haaland—and for Pueblo peoples everywhere, like me—it is an ancestral homeland whose cultural and spiritual connections endure across generations.

“She’s not going to give it away or sell it off,” said Loretta Lovato, a retired school teacher from Belen, south of Albuquerque. She had attended a recent campaign event with her 91-year-old mother, Stella. Both praised Halaand for her efforts to protect Chaco. 

“That’s a big deal, to preserve all those canyons and not destroy them like Trump wants to,” said Stella. 

But defending Chaco from federal oil and gas development is one thing. Governing a state whose economic fortunes depend on the same industry is another. 

Last year, oil and gas windfalls financed nearly half the state’s $10.2 billion operating budget.

The Land of Enchantment has become a heavy name to carry in a state that is truly hurting. Across New Mexico, the unhoused population is on the rise, as public schools rank last in the nation and cities are first or near the top in crime. Poverty remains entrenched, while shortages of affordable housing and health care have stretched communities thin. Haaland wants to expand public services, including through a state-backed health insurance option. 

But those ambitions depend on a state budget heavily supported by oil and gas. New Mexico’s oil production has nearly doubled in recent years, while drilling permits approved under Haaland’s Interior Department outpaced those under the previous Trump administration.  

This wealth has helped build an extraordinary nest egg that some have called “the envy of Wall Street”—state investment funds worth roughly $75 billion, projected to reach $100 billion by the end of the decade. Last year, oil and gas windfalls financed nearly half the state’s $10.2 billion operating budget, supporting an array of progressive social programs enacted during the second term of outgoing Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham.

From universal child care and tuition-free college to guaranteed school meals, New Mexico’s popular social safety net remains tethered to an industry Haaland once pledged to keep at arm’s length. The predicament has confronted virtually every elected Democrat statewide—a balancing act of liberal ambition and economic reality.  

Was oil and gas a necessary evil? “I think it is right now,” Haaland told me in Taos, moments before giving a stump speech.  “The gas industry has been in our state for 100 years, right?”  

Much like Norway, which transformed petroleum revenues into a vast sovereign wealth fund, New Mexico has been investing its fossil fuel windfalls to secure a future less dependent on oil—and with an eye toward climate resilience. The state’s investment council has modeled energy-transition scenarios in which growing investment income could offset declining oil and gas revenues. The council expects to distribute more than $42 billion over the next decade, with investment earnings projected to overtake oil and gas as the state’s largest revenue source by 2042. 

When I asked Haaland how future investments could help the state become more climate resilient, she pointed directly to the New Mexico’s emissions targets. “Moving our clean energy transition forward—nothing will stop us from doing that because we have goals, our clean energy goals for our state, so I want to see those through.”

But she was whisked away before I could ask about whether those goals are even attainable anymore. Just this week, state climate officials testified that New Mexico is off-track to meet its 2030 greenhouse gas reduction targets. A bill charting a path to net-zero emissions by 2050 also died during the last legislative session. Neither setback seemed to figure into Haaland’s confident assessment of the state’s environmental future.  

Jon Clark, the state’s chief investment officer, said the agency is preparing for climate-related financial risks, creating a position dedicated to assessing how those risks could affect its investments and future oil revenues. “We need to try to be investing in things that go up when oil goes down,” Clark said. 

He added, whoever becomes the next governor will have an extraordinary opportunity for long-term, unprecedented planning. But he warned: “It is going to be a challenge.”

The road to Taos followed the bends of the Rio Grande, past golden cottonwoods in the mid-afternoon light. KKOB, Albuquerque’s conservative talk radio station, crackled as my car dipped into the canyon. Through the static came the words of one caller frustrated over the lack of transparency surrounding Project Jupiter, particularly what he described as an absence of public comment. He connected those concerns to Haaland’s decision to keep the campaign contributions linked to the controversial development. The money, he said, made her look like a “rubber stamp for Big Tech.” The host, Brandon Vogt, agreed. 

It was the final Friday before Election Day, and Haaland had joined other Democratic candidates for one last push to get voters to the polls. From a small stage inside a restaurant that prepares hot meals for after-school programs, Haaland warned of looming Medicaid cuts and the pressure Washington was placing on New Mexico families. “We can’t have a Republican in the roundhouse rubber-stamping what Donald Trump is doing,” she said. 

In the closing days of the campaign, the accusation of rubber-stamping had crossed party lines. But for Isaac Lira, whose boyhood town now confronts the impacts of a sprawling AI data center, the stakes were more personal. Where he once admired Haaland for overcoming struggles familiar to his own, he now questioned why a candidate with $20.5 million in campaign funds has refused to return contributions from corporate interests she once proudly protested against—money, that in the end, amounted to just 1 percent of her total fundraising war chest. 

“It is just disheartening,” Lira said. “Coming from a working-class background, knowing the struggle, yet saying, ‘Hey, you know, I can’t do anything about it.’”