Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland won the Democratic primary for New Mexico governor on Tuesday, defeating Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman and clearing the biggest hurdle to the open governor’s office.
The result puts Haaland into the general election to succeed term-limited Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham, and it leaves Republicans to choose one of three candidates — Rio Rancho Mayor Gregg Hull, businessman and former gubernatorial candidate Doug Turner, or former state Human Services Secretary Duke Rodriguez — before November.
Haaland’s victory matters because New Mexico has no Republican statewide officeholders, a fact that makes her the early front-runner in a race that could still turn on turnout and message. If she wins in the fall, she would become the first Native American woman to serve as governor, adding another first to a career that already made her the first Native American woman elected to Congress and later a member of Joe Biden’s Cabinet.
Her campaign leaned hard into that record. Haaland, who served one term representing the Albuquerque area and later chaired the state Democratic Party, ran ads in the Diné language and framed the race around daily costs, health care and the state's future. In her own words, “Everybody deserves to have health care, deserves to eat healthy food.”
She also used the race to attack Donald Trump’s agenda in Washington while presenting Biden as a political plus, even though the former president remains deeply unpopular after his 2024 withdrawal. Haaland said, “We’re in a horrible era right now with our federal government, and people see that the policies that Donald Trump is inflicting on New Mexicans are having a very negative effect all over the state.” She added that Biden is “absolutely an asset” to her campaign and called him a “true partner” to New Mexico and Indigenous people across the U.S.
That message may help her in a state with among the highest enrollments in Medicaid and federal food assistance, two programs that faced massive cuts in the law Trump signed last year. It also gives Republicans a clean line of attack: Haaland is running as a champion for New Mexicans while tying herself to national Democratic figures and national fights, and the question now is whether that mix can hold once the general election turns into a direct contest with the GOP nominee.
For Haaland, Tuesday was the easy part. The harder test comes in November, when she will have to turn a primary victory into a statewide coalition and prove that her history-making candidacy can survive a race that will not be decided by Democrats alone.
