Haaland Wins New Mexico After Pledging a Data-Center Pause

Card photograph: ARCHIVE. Deb Haaland and Bryan Newland visit Indigenous communities in Arizona and New Mexico, 2024-03-05. U.S. Department of the Interior, Public domain. Cropped for the card. License. Source photograph.

Deb Haaland won New Mexico’s governorship on November 3 after promising to halt new large-scale data-center projects while lawmakers develop safeguards. The Democrat defeated Republican Gregg Hull and became the first Native American woman elected governor, according to the AP call reported by Source New Mexico.

Haaland celebrated on Laguna Pueblo land at the Route 66 Casino Hotel. A Laguna member and former Interior secretary, she will succeed term-limited Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham. Her victory joins Keisha Lance Bottoms’s win in Georgia in placing a new governor’s campaign commitments to healthcare and public services before state legislatures.

The data-center pledge is unusually immediate: Haaland said she would impose a statewide moratorium by executive order upon taking office, pending legislation. That would interrupt approvals rather than leave communities to negotiate safeguards after individual projects were already advancing.

Land and public authority

Deb Haaland, official Interior Department portrait, July 2021. U.S. Department of the Interior. Public domain. Source photograph. License.

Haaland’s federal record includes the June 2023 withdrawal around Chaco Culture National Historical Park. It barred new federal mineral leasing and mining claims within a 10-mile radius for 20 years, subject to existing rights. Existing leases and nonfederal minerals were outside that prohibition.

The Albuquerque Journal’s election-night reporting independently documents Hull’s defeat and his concession after 10 p.m. The former Rio Rancho mayor had campaigned for a phased repeal of New Mexico’s personal income tax, seeking to return part of the state’s oil-funded revenue to taxpayers. Haaland instead pledged to maintain the state’s universal childcare initiative.

Housing and healthcare, not just investment

Her published state program combines a higher minimum wage and child tax credit with faster housing permitting, down-payment assistance for critical workers and a ban on algorithmic rent setting. These address separate sources of hardship: insufficient income, difficulty buying a home and landlords’ ability to coordinate prices.

On healthcare, Haaland campaigned for a public option. Her plans also propose rural medical residencies, mobile clinics and recruitment incentives. Coverage and staffing solve different problems. An insurance card is of limited use when the nearest available appointment requires travel a worker cannot arrange.

Haaland also pledged reading coaches in schools statewide in her victory speech, the Journal reported. Her community-school proposals would connect children to counseling and health services, adding staff and care to the institutions families already use.

Haaland takes office on New Year’s Day, with a cabinet to assemble and a budget recommendation to prepare before the 60-day legislative session begins in January. Her promised data-center order would precede the legislation intended to replace it. The safeguards, funding and enforcement would then require decisions by the new administration and lawmakers.