WASHINGTON — Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego is giving his party something to celebrate in an otherwise brutal 2024 election, winning an open Senate race in battleground Arizona, even as President-elect Donald Trump carried it handily.
The senator-elect did it by outperforming Vice President Kamala Harris’ margin by 8 points in the state. Latino voters overall were more than a quarter of Arizona’s electorate — Gallego won them by 22 points while Harris carried them by 10 points. As for Latino men, Trump won them by 12 points nationally, marking a stunning 35-point swing from 2020 that powered him to victory in key states, according to NBC News’ exit polls. But Gallego held his ground with Latino men, winning them by 30 points, exit polls showed.
In an interview Friday, Gallego said he recognized early on that fellow Latinos were persuadable voters and not merely a base mobilization target. When asked why Democratic leaders misunderstood the electorate, Gallego said those who failed to empathize with the depth of pain felt by Latinos from the pandemic and inflation paid the price for it.
“I think we are missing the two things that were very compounded between 2020 and 2024. Men — Latino men — were feeling very insecure about their positions in the family because they wanted to make sure that they’re providers and providing security and economic security. During Covid, we shut down businesses — and for good reason, we had to make sure that we were stopping the spread of Covid,” Gallego told NBC News in the Capitol. “But people were kept out of work.”
“These men were working but weren’t able to support their families as much as they wanted. They weren’t able to buy homes,” he said. “And so it’s the same commonality. If we don’t answer the economic pressure, the bottom-line wallet pressure that these men have — and it’s not just Latino men, I think men in general — we’re going to continue having these problems.”
Gallego said he tailored his campaign and message to acknowledge their plight. He spoke of his humble beginnings, being raised by a single mom, empathized with the aspirations of working-class voters to succeed and persuaded them he would focus on fixing what’s broken.
“And we just did that, over and over again,” he said.
It worked. He outperformed Harris among voters who cited the economy as their top concern, exit polls showed, and covered off the vulnerability that sank many Democrats, including Harris. While Trump won the state, Gallego defeated Republican Kari Lake, who modeled her campaign on the former president’s MAGA model.
On paper, some Democrats were initially skeptical that someone like Gallego, who as a congressman represented a deep-blue Phoenix area House district, had what it took to win statewide in Arizona. Gallego quietly left the Congressional Progressive Caucus during his Senate run and also broke with the Biden administration’s unpopular record on immigration enforcement. Harris, as the vice president overseeing that record, struggled to do the same.
“We took a very strong and direct approach at border security because we knew that the Latino community was actually also worried about border security,” he said.
When asked where he can find common ground with Trump next year, Gallego said, “Number one, border security.”
Trump and his allies poured millions into anti-transgender ads across the country, including in Arizona, to paint Democrats as focused on the wrong priorities. Gallego said he saw the ads but argued that they didn’t work on him.
“I didn’t see them resonating. Look, when I was out communicating, talking to people, having town halls in English and Spanish everywhere, I heard more about grocery store prices, about grocery store mergers,” he said. “Actually, I don’t remember ever having a conversation about trans and trans students. So it may have had an impact in other campaigns. I think because we were communicating who we were — people knew my background, knew I was working class, knew that I was fighting for them — I don’t think it really had any impact.”
Gallego said Lake hasn’t contacted him to concede the race, which NBC News projected for the Democrat late Monday night. He isn’t holding his breath.
“No tweets, no texts, no Snapchats,” he laughed. “But it’s OK. We’re moving on. We’re here to work for all Arizonans, including people like Kari Lake.”
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