Senator Ruben Gallego won election in Arizona in 2024 by emphasizing prosperity over equity. Now, he wants the rest of the Democratic Party to follow suit. In this interview with David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion, Senator Gallego gives the Democrats some tough love on border security and affordability and explains what he appreciates about the story New York’s mayoral front-runner, Zohran Mamdani, is telling.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: Senator Gallego, thanks for being here.
Senator Ruben Gallego: Thanks for having me.
Leonhardt: You just dropped one of your kids off at day care. You just had a new baby.
Gallego: That’s right.
Leonhardt: And your oldest kid is here with us today.
Gallego: Yes, he’s on school break. So he’s going to tag along with Dad for a bit.
Leonhardt: Let’s go back to college. You went to Harvard University in the early 2000s.
Gallego: Yeah.
Leonhardt: Back then, as is still the case, the most popular things to do coming out of Harvard included tech, finance and consulting. You did something different. You went into the Marines. Why?
Gallego: Well, it wasn’t much of a choice. I was a reservist and I had always intended to serve my country one way or the other. I joined about a year before Sept. 11. After that, I went on a series of activations. When I got out, I had about one and a half years left on my contract. I moved to Albuquerque, N.M., and they told me if I joined that I would be sent to Iraq. To be honest, I hated the war. I hated that we had gone to war, but I also felt very conflicted that if I didn’t go, someone else was going to take my spot. So I went, and, unfortunately, it was a very hard activation. By the time I was done, the war had changed me a lot to the point where I just couldn’t go and do the finance work, the other types of work. I needed to do something that had some meaning and drive in my life because the war really took a lot out of me.
Leonhardt: So you moved to Arizona and you got involved in politics. You were in the State Legislature and then got elected to Congress, and then you ran for the U.S. Senate. Let’s go to election night last year because you must have had mixed feelings. You won and you were going to the U.S. Senate at a pretty young age, and you also realized that Donald Trump was going back to the presidency. What was that like when you realized that you were going to win, but Kamala Harris was going to lose?
Gallego: We knew on election night when the numbers came in from two big counties and one rural area that there was basically no way for us to lose at that point. But seeing the numbers that the vice president hit — and she was leading — but knowing how votes break out, we knew that it wasn’t going to hold. It was hard because I wanted to jump for joy; my family had sacrificed for two years to run for office, and we were proud as a family that we had achieved an amazing American story. We didn’t come from a lineage of senators. But then, of course, there’s Trump, and I realized that that’s going to be a very hard situation. I was hopeful, to be honest, that maybe things would be better than they are right now, but they’re not.
Leonhardt: How do you diagnose why you won Arizona and Kamala Harris lost it?
Gallego: We were very real about what was actually happening on the ground, and we didn’t lie to ourselves. I think a lot of Democrats running — and it wasn’t just Vice President Harris — they wanted to talk about the things they were comfortable talking about. They didn’t want to go to where the voter was.
Leonhardt: So they wanted to talk about abortion and democracy.
Gallego: Basically, yes. Sometimes there’s some voters that want to talk about that. But what we were seeing on the ground in Arizona was that people were worried about being able to make the rent; they were worried about border security; and they were worried about what is truly happening to the American dream. For a place like Arizona that was known to be affordable and had always been affordable, for the first time in anybody’s memory, it became a very unaffordable place very quickly. And Democrats sounded extremely out of touch that we weren’t talking about that. Now, my campaign, we did talk about it. That’s all we talked about. We talked about the cost of everything, and we did it in a way that wasn’t an economic message. It was an emotional message.
I talked about how I grew up poor and that I understand how frustrating it is. I remember those days — to work and work and work and then look up and you’re still underwater. And that is what was dragging down a lot of people in Arizona, especially working-class Latino men who have a mentality that I can work and get myself out of this situation. But for the first time, I heard a desperation that I had never heard in my 45 years of being a Latino man — that they just felt they weren’t going to make it. And we talked to them because I understood what they were going through. A lot of Democrats did not do that. Certainly not in Arizona, but I think also across the country.
Leonhardt: I think if we had a member of Vice President Harris’s campaign team here, they might say, “Hey, look, we tried. We criticized Donald Trump’s tariffs as being attacks on the American people. We talked about her focus on lifting people up.” And so I do think they tried.
Gallego: I think they did try. I just think there’s a lot of ways to do it that probably weren’t able to connect.
Leonhardt: Yeah, and what’s interesting to me about this is it plays into this broader critique you’ve had about the Democratic Party, which is how it talks to people.
Gallego: And how it treats people, too.
Leonhardt: How it treats people, too. And you got a whole bunch of attention a few years ago for banning your staff in Congress from using the term Latinx, which you said is mostly a term that white liberals use and Latinas and Latinos think is silly. I’m interested in your critique of how Democrats talk about the economy because I think often the economy is an issue in which Democrats feel like, “Hey, we’re comfortable on that issue. It’s not like immigration. It’s not like gender. We’re comfortable in the economy.” But you’ve said actually, the Democratic Party still talks too much like Harvard professors and not enough like Marine Corps members — to use your life experience. So, specifically, you’ve said this idea, that Democrats should talk about the American dream in terms of prosperity, rather than, “a nebulous message about justice.” Can you be more specific about that?
Gallego: So, I mean, a lot of times, especially in the last couple of years, what I’ve heard coming from the Democratic side, my friends, is that they talk about economic equity. They talk about these ideas of essentially trying to equalize capitalism, to lift people out of poverty. And that’s just not how people think. It’s also this assumption that the Democrats themselves, the actual base voters, don’t want to be prosperous, they don’t want to be rich, or they don’t want to be successful. And so we have this situation within Democratic talk where we kind of shy away from that because we feel like that’s somehow icky.
I’m surrounded by working-class Democrats, and the reason I speak the way I speak is because no one in my family’s involved in politics. Half of my family members are in unions; the other half are very working class. I have one sister who’s a doctor. I live in a working-class neighborhood in Phoenix. No one there talks about economic equity. What they talk about is: I want to be able to buy a home. I am starting a business; I want to make money. I want my kids to do well. I want to be happy. And when we have these nebulous positions that people just can’t put their finger on, then Democrats are kind of losing an opportunity.
If we’re the party of opportunity, if we’re the party that’s going to give you a real chance at the American dream, then buying a home, starting a business, being able to go on vacation, for God’s sake — the things that people used to be able to do — then people say: That’s the party that I want in there to fight for me. But when we’re just this nebulous blah group of people that is going to protect this idea but we don’t actually ever really do anything about it, voters are going to go off to something else shinier. And the shinier has come with Donald Trump.
Leonhardt: This is the point where I have to ask about big [expletive] trucks.
Gallego: Yeah. Troquitas!
Leonhardt: In an interview with The New York Times, you said that what Latino men want is to own a big [expletive] truck, which is connected very much to what you were just saying. I assume you would say the point is broader than Latino men.
Gallego: Yes.
Leonhardt: It’s men and women.
Gallego: Men and women — it’s everything.
Leonhardt: Asian, Black and white.
Gallego: Yeah. I mean, I said that mostly just to kind of break through this, because I’ve heard it so much — like, “Why do Latino men go this way?” And I’m like, well, Latino men want things. There are a lot of Democrats and people on the more liberal side who hope that Latino men are more reflective — that they look and vote like white liberal men. But they don’t. They’re different. They have entirely different experiences. And they’re not like Black men, either — they have their own, very different experience. So, to kind of break through, you have to keep it simple: They want security — economic security and physical security for their families. And their wants are legitimate. We shouldn’t shy away from or ignore that just because it puts us in an uncomfortable spot.
So the troquita, the truck — it’s symbolic because it really is a status symbol that you have succeeded in this country. It means that you can afford a brand-new, nice truck. That you take that truck to work and that work brings dignity to your family. It helps you pay the bills. You get to load your kids in there. You get to go on vacation. It involves this whole symbolic gesture to your community that you are leading your family and that you are bringing them into the American dream. That’s what it really represents, and I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable about that. But that really is as simple as ——
Leonhardt: Also, trucks are fun.
Gallego: Trucks are a lot of fun.
Leonhardt: I think to me that’s a version of you saying the party needs to talk more about prosperity and less about things like equity and justice.
Gallego: Look, I think there was a lot of thought post-Obama, that if we focus on equity and justice, then that somehow would be the unifier of the Democratic coalition. It ends up, the biggest unifier of the Democratic coalition — Black, white, Latino immigrants, Asians, everybody else — is the personal checking account. It’s people being able to buy a home, be able to pay bills, be able to get groceries without stressing out. That actually is what unifies our coalition. And when we walked away from that because of just pure political convenience, our coalition started eroding more and more and more. And we’re seeing it all the time.
Leonhardt: I didn’t predict that Donald Trump would get increasing support over his political career from Latino and Black and Asian Americans. But the fact is, he has, and it feels like Democrats made this fundamental misdiagnosis, which is that people think of themselves first in terms of racial or ethnic groups. It turns out that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Gallego: It doesn’t. It does. It depends. That’s the other thing — when does it happen? When there is that racial group that feels like they collectively are under attack? I’ll tell you right now, the Republican Party is going to lose badly with Latinos come 2026 because they moved beyond, “Hey, we’re going after criminals.” Now there’s racial profiling in the streets. Originally, I’m from Chicago. I have a lot of friends and family there with varying degrees of politics and who they support. And I would say I did see Latino men, especially in Chicago, moving away from the Democratic Party. That’s not happening right now.
Leonhardt: Yeah. I promise we’ll get to immigration.
Gallego: You don’t have to. I talk about it too much.
Leonhardt: We will, we will. Let’s stay on trucks for a minute. So you said big [expletive] trucks and then the writer Matthew Yglesias took that and coined this term “big [expletive] truck abundance,” which plays into this policy debate and political debate on abundance within the Democratic Party. So I’m going to overgeneralize a little bit, but the abundance crowd, which includes my colleague Ezra Klein, basically says the Democratic Party should focus on getting rid of bureaucracy and making more stuff: houses, transportation, clean energy.
And then there’s another part of the debate, which is more associated with the progressive wing of the party, like Bernie Sanders, A.O.C., that says: No, economic and political power is the issue and we can’t be naïve, and we have to focus on cracking down on corporate power. And we should be creating universal government programs for child care, which I know is an issue you deal with in your own personal life. So where do you stand? Do you think you’re more on one side in that debate, or do you straddle the two?
Gallego: There’s a really good commercial for taco shells, and there’s a debate of whether they should be soft or hard. At the end of the commercial, this really cute Latino little girl says, “Por que no los dos?” — “Why can’t it be both?” We should be able to mix both of this, right? We should be building things fast, as fast as possible, especially housing. And at the same time, we should be making sure that monopolies don’t control markets that are driving up prices. We should be able to build roads fast and at the same time make sure that there’s ways for us to have affordable child care for working-class America. I don’t understand why everyone seems to be in these corners, because the American people aren’t that way. If we make their lives better by both means, then we get the net benefit, which is their support and their vote.
Leonhardt: So you’re saying you can be both pro-abundance and you can be a populist who wants to take on corporate power?
Gallego: Absolutely. It doesn’t mean that everything’s a fight. It doesn’t mean every corporation is bad. But there are some bad ones, right? It doesn’t mean that every regulation is bad. But there are some bad regulations. I think we as policymakers, as the actual people that vote and are leaders, we have to be able to pick and choose when to use the tools. So maybe sometimes it is abundance, sometimes it is going against our monopolies.
Leonhardt: So it’s interesting, because I think the answers you just gave on abundance could also have been given by Zohran Mamdani, the New York politician.
Gallego: I’ve heard of him.
Leonhardt: I’m sure you have. What do you think of him?
Gallego: I think he really struck a chord. And you know what? When I talk about big [expletive] truck policy, and that’s how I got a lot of people to vote — like the man’s talking about affordable rents. Being able to afford a — I don’t know — for New York, like an apartment with a second bathroom or ——
Leonhardt: Medium [expletive] apartment.
Gallego: Yeah, medium [expletive] apartment. He talks about affordability. I disagree with some things, like I don’t think they should have government-run grocery stores. But I guarantee you there’s a lot of New Yorkers who are like: You know what? I don’t agree with that, but at least he’s talking about it. At least he has some ideas. At least he’s pushing something. And I think there’s a lot of Democrats that are missing the boat. We don’t have to support Mamdani on everything; we could just disagree in some areas. But the fact is that he talks about affordability. He talks about trying to make people’s lives better. That’s resonating. And now we may not agree how he’s going to get there, but let’s not ignore the lesson that he’s showing.
Leonhardt: I do think there’s this interesting question about the attention economy today. Zohran Mamdani is clearly on the left of the Democratic Party.
Gallego: Yes.
Leonhardt: I think what we see today is that it often feels easier for people who are making arguments and drawing contrasts and their critics would say are at the extremes to get attention. You’re much more moderate, and sometimes moderation can seem boring if we’re being honest. But you figured out a way to break through in Arizona. What do you think about how someone with your politics doesn’t just come off as boring and technocratic in this day and age of social media and attention?
Gallego: I think what happened with us in Arizona was that we used some smart ways to get into people’s feeds. We did boxing matches, we did car shows, truck shows — a lot of that stuff. But I reached out to white suburban people with pickleball tournaments, too. We did everything we could. But the reason it resonated is because, while I was using them to get their attention, I was talking to them about what they were really worried about right now. And the ability for any candidate or elected official to talk in an authentic way will carry through. It will.
The problem we have on the Democratic side is we have less and less of us that actually can speak about the personal checkbook and economics of a family in an authentic way. That’s why you could get on TV as much as you want, you could go on podcasts, do your Instagram Lives, and it’s not going to catch on.
Leonhardt: It’s really interesting because whether you’re coming from the left or closer to the center, both Mamdani in New York and you in Arizona, your messaging really emphasized those economic issues. So he didn’t talk in his mayoral campaign about ICE or about Gaza very much. He emphasized the same things you’re talking about.
Gallego: Right, because that’s what voters care about every day. You get reminded about it every week. So, I have three kids, we have a family of five, and we go grocery shopping every week. I see that grocery bill and I’m very lucky. My wife and I make a good salary, so it doesn’t impact us that much, but I notice that price and I still have a poor boy mentality. When you grow up poor, it’s hard to get out of that mentality. So I’m still kind of watching all this. If I’m seeing this, I can’t imagine what a family is thinking every Saturday and Sunday when they go shopping.
Gallego: Right, it just hits you.
Leonhardt: So we’ve touched on immigration a couple times now. Let’s really dig in on it. One of your early forays into politics in Arizona was you helped lead a recall campaign against Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Gallego: I got very close. too.
Leonhardt: He was, as I’m sure many listeners remember, this cruel anti-immigrant sheriff. And more recently, I think your image on immigration has changed. In your campaign, you criticized Joe Biden’s open immigration policy. You cosponsored the Laken Riley Act, which calls for the detention of undocumented immigrants who’ve committed certain crimes even before the court trial has happened. How would you describe your own personal evolution or not on immigration?
Gallego: It hasn’t actually been that much of an evolution. You know, why was I trying to recall Sheriff Joe? He was racially profiling Americans — he was racially profiling Latinos because we were brown. He was pulling them over for driving while brown. It had nothing to do with immigration, nothing else like that. No. 1, that’s why — and I’d do it again if something like that ever happened again. No. 2, I think the Democratic understanding of immigration and illegal immigration has always been pretty basic, and then it went awry. It used to be: We’re for border security, we’re for humanitarian immigration reform, and we’re for reforming the overall visa and worker permit system. But something happened where, all of a sudden — we were also supposed to be extremely liberal when it comes to asylum seekers.
Leonhardt: When do you think that happened?
Gallego: It’s happened sometime between Trump and Biden. And I think there was this overall reaction to Trump in his first term that a lot of people just assumed that this is where the new conversation went when there were some of us that grew up both on the border one way or the other. I also lived in Mexico for a little bit, and I have family in all levels of immigration, going on through my whole life. When that started happening, a lot of us were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not what we want. But nobody wanted to listen to us. And what happened was that a lot of policymakers started listening to some more liberal people about what was happening at the border.
Leonhardt: Liberal people who claimed to speak for the Latino community.
Gallego: Latinos, yes.
Leonhardt: In many cases, liberal people who themselves were Latino. The ones getting a hearing in the administration.
Gallego: Yes. And because they were in their little bubbles and without any personal experience, the administration just basically listened to them. And for us that had always had the same position — my position has not changed; I’m for border security. I’m for immigration reform. Sane immigration reform. If you’re a criminal, you should be convicted and deported. That’s never changed. The problem is we went totally to an area where a lot of Democrats weren’t. So my position, I think, is where the traditional Democrats have been.
If you listen to what Hillary Clinton was saying, what Barack Obama was saying, and what Bill Clinton was saying about immigration — that’s been the traditional position. What happened in the last four years was completely outside the norm of where Democrats usually are, and that’s part of why we lost — because we got out of step with where most Americans are. And now, if you look at what’s happening, most Americans are very unhappy with the way immigration is being handled right now because they like that the border is secure and which — I get yelled at all the time because I say it’s a good thing that the border is secure.
Leonhardt: Meaning Trump has secured it.
Gallego: Yes, exactly. That’s a good thing. It’s a value to this country that we have the lowest amount of illegal immigrants crossing the border right now. What I want them to do now is: Let’s do immigration reform, stop racially profiling, stop deploying National Guards to patrol these streets that are supposedly dangerous and instead really invest in a smart way of dealing with a broken system.
Leonhardt: So I think that’s what some Democrats who are in a little bit of a different place than you would say, which is, there will be a time to debate the finer points of immigration policy and a time to vote for a bill like the Laken Riley Act, or not vote for it. But this isn’t that time. We’ve got federal agents in masks picking people up off the street. We’ve got the president deporting people to a horrible foreign prison without due process. We’ve got the president and his administration racially profiling Latinos ——
Gallego: You have to do both. Here’s why you have to do both, David. If you give the voter the option of saying, either we’re going to have security that’s way too strong, or no security at all, they’re going to give the more security side the benefit of the doubt. So the Democrats, we have to have a position that is a position that Americans can gather to and say: You know what? I totally disagree with what this guy is doing with the roundups, the deportations, everything else like that. What I want to see is what the Democrats are proposing, and what they’re proposing is more where I am. If we’re only oppositional and just saying no, no, no, we’re going to end up losing this argument in the end. Because people generally want to be secure, and if we don’t give them some type of idea of what we’re bringing, they’re going to go to whoever is giving them any type of security.
Leonhardt: Let me read what Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois recently said. He said: “This is exactly the moment for people to stand up. And do I see enough people doing it? No, I don’t.” Do you disagree with that?
Gallego: I think this is the moment to stand up. I think there are people that are moving into the fight. This is not a very easy situation for a lot of people, your everyday American. It’s not that they want an open border. It’s not that they want people deported. There’s just a lot of stuff going on in their lives right now. There’s just a lot of stuff. And from talking to my family that’s still in Chicago, they’re afraid. I mean, this is the first time ——
Leonhardt: Of being picked up?
Gallego: Of being picked up. They’re afraid for their country. But asking for people to take action right now, it’s not as easy as it sounds because people are generally afraid of what could happen. And that is part of this decision-making that’s happening right now. But it’s not like people are going to protest like they used to back in the day. because people are generally afraid for their personal safety.
Leonhardt: I think I’ve also heard you suggesting that Democrats need to be strategic about this, and you probably wouldn’t put it this way, but not always stand on principle. So after ——
Gallego: I would never put it that way.
Leonhardt: I know you wouldn’t, but that’s why I want to push you a little bit. It feels fair. I read an interview where you were discussing Trump’s deportation of alleged gang members to El Salvador, and you said it’s important to defend due process. You’ve criticized Trump as you’re doing here, but you also said Democrats shouldn’t just jump and automatically assume that No. 1, the person you’re advocating for is someone that people can empathize with. And so I’m kind of interested in that — you said that was an unjust deportation, but it’s not the fight we want to have.
Gallego: Yes. Look, you have to be smart about this. There’s perfect examples throughout any type of movement. I’ll give you a good example. When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to go to the back of the bus, it wasn’t a coincidence that it was Rosa Parks. They had purposely vetted a lot of candidates to see who would be the best example of this horrible segregation system. And they let in Rosa Parks. If we want to point out how awful this deportation system is, and what it’s doing to families, we should do it in a smart way. Let’s find the most caring person, the person that people can empathize with. The person that says: I want that person to stay in our country. Don’t rush to a fight that someone has already set up because these guys — and I think a lot of people don’t quite understand — Donald Trump’s people are smart. They set up traps of this nature all the time, and they love nothing more than for us to just run in there and get into it with them. And they have all the advantages; they’ve already set up the field to fight in. They have all the information, and we’re just playing catch-up.
If you want to win — and I think that’s the ultimate goal — let’s be smart about actually doing this right. Why not use the people that can actually connect with this issue.
Leonhardt: This is a podcast series about what America’s next story should be, and what you’re saying is be smart about the story that the Democratic Party is telling.
Gallego: Absolutely. We have to want to win, and we have to plan to win. Those things don’t necessarily happen in Democratic politics. I’ve seen it over and over and over again. I’ve never lost a race every time I run. And the reason I’ve never lost a race is largely because I don’t bring any political perspective. I bring a Marine perspective to this, and the Marines teach you everything about mission objectives first. And then you build your whole campaign, your whole plan, your whole battle plan around the mission objective, and you’re agnostic about it.
So when we ran for the House and for the Senate, I figured out what I needed to win and put the plan together and went. Democrats sometimes try to stumble into victories, and that might be fine, but this really means people’s lives are in danger. Democrats not winning in 2024 and 2016 really cost us a lot of our positions and values that are going to be in danger for quite a while.
Leonhardt: I would say that I think sometimes Democrats confuse the story that they want to be the winning message with the one that actually is going to be the winning message.
Gallego: Yes, because it makes them uncomfortable. But then — why are we doing this? We need to win. If we don’t win, we don’t have the Supreme Court — and we won’t have it for quite a while. Not winning those Senate seats over the last few years has kept us from potentially holding power again. All the victories we missed out on were because we were afraid to have these conversations — these icky conversations. And now, look at what’s happening to this country.
Leonhardt: There’s a class aspect of this, which is that the people who often find these positions and conversations icky tend to be more affluent and more educated. And in working-class neighborhoods, actually, people are quite willing to engage in these conversations for the most part.
Gallego: And they do all the time. That’s the thing they do all the time. Going back to the big [expletive] truck, everyone’s like: Oh, you’re looking down on Latino men by saying they want a big [expletive] truck. Quite the opposite. Actually, the problem that happens in elite Democratic politics is that we don’t think that the voter is that smart. We believe that we have to dumb things down when voters are fairly sophisticated.
They do not use sophisticated language or anything else of that nature, but they know what they’re feeling, and they know when we’re throwing [expletive] at them, and they will vote in their own interests. Until we’re willing to accept that, until we are willing to actually have real conversations, we’re going to be finding ourselves still on a declining support level.
Leonhardt: Let’s end by connecting your personal story with what you think the country’s next story should be. So as you mentioned, you grew up in Chicago, you grew up poor with a single mom and three sisters. It’s the kind of story in broad brush that I think used to feel more typical than it does today. There’s less upward mobility, and I think a lot of Americans are understandably angry about a lot of things. And yet you made optimism absolutely central to your campaign. Here are the opening lines of the ad that introduced you to Arizona voters last year:
Audio clip of Ruben Gallego: “Growing up poor, the only thing I had was the American dream. An opportunity. It’s the one thing we give every American no matter where they are born in life.”
I think for a lot of people it’s an incredibly inspiring story, whether it’s one generation or whether it’s three generations ——
Gallego: Eight generations, whatever it is.
Leonhardt: And it’s often connected to the immigrant experience. I guess I have to ask: Do you still think we give that opportunity to every American?
Gallego: I still think that we can. I think that the things that used to exist, the infrastructure of hope, of opportunity, is kind of slowly eroding. I think what we need to do as Democrats, as Americans, is put that back together.
So for me, it was: I had a decent school. My mom was a secretary — wasn’t great pay, but wasn’t horrible pay. We had an affordable apartment. I slept in the living room, but we stayed in that apartment. It was in the same school district. I had support all around me. I knew that if I got good grades, I could afford to go to college. I could get a scholarship. There was this idea that my sacrifice, my family’s sacrifice, was going to have end results.
What I hear, and this is why the campaign started the way it did, is because — especially from working-class people — they don’t feel that anymore. And the future of America has to go back to the future of where a Ruben Gallego felt comfortable in believing that the American dream was possible. We have to be able to tell the kid in Kentucky or the kid in California: Yeah, you’re poor. Life sucks. But if you do this, you’re going to be fine. And until we actually not just talk about it but put back the policies and the infrastructure of how to become successful, how to get out of poverty, people aren’t going to believe it.
Leonhardt: Can I take a crack at telling you what I think you think America’s next story should be?
Gallego: Sure.
Leonhardt: So it should be one part — call it Rosa Parks moderation — respecting voters, meeting them where they are. I think it’s one part populism. You talk about taking on the rich and powerful — I mean, you’ve said if you’re in Congress and you’re spending more time with the powerful than the powerless, you’re doing the job wrong.
Gallego: Right.
Leonhardt: And I think it’s one part optimism. It is about the American dream.
Gallego: Absolutely.
Leonhardt: Is that fair?
Gallego: It’s very fair. Honestly, I think if I had to say what the future is, it is the American dream. It’s a thing that’s driven us forever. It’s what drove us to the shores here. It’s what drove us west. It’s what drove people from all over the world to come here. It’s what drove me some really, really hard days. Like, I remember, just being very angry as a young man, and it wasn’t because of the situation that I was in. My anger was the idea that I’m going to work so hard and that I may not succeed. And yeah, I just don’t think I want to have any other young man or woman have that feeling.
Leonhardt: Senator Ruben Gallego, thank you.
Gallego: Thank you so much.
Leonhardt: All right.
Gallego: Got tears out of me, David. [Expletive] you. Oh, sorry, son, don’t use that word.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Ptkin. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Original music by Carole Sabouruad. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
David Leonhardt is an editorial director for the Times Opinion section, overseeing the editing and writing of editorials. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
The post Senator Ruben Gallego Has Three Words For Democrats appeared first on New York Times.
