I talked to Ruben Gallego. Democrats should listen to him. - Rubin WaPo [View all]

In a bleak election cycle for Democrats, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) defeated Kari Lake in the Arizona Senate race, outpacing Vice President Kamala Harris by roughly four points and by nine points among Latino men. Democrats, naturally, want to know how he did it. For starters, Gallego has an extraordinary biography. Raised in a poor neighborhood by a single mother, he worked his way through school, became the first in his family to go to college (Harvard), then enlisted in the Marines and deployed to Iraq in a unit that suffered some of the war’s worst losses.

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Critically, Gallego grasped that voters, including many Latino men, “felt like they were drowning” because of inflation. He told me, “They felt betrayed. They felt that they let their family down.” Facing this as an emotional and not just an economic issue, Gallego recognized the need to give people permission to “not blame themselves.” When cutting an ad on rising prices, he improvised a line speaking to this sentiment — “It’s not your fault.”

Gallego did not shy away from border security. As a progressive with a no-nonsense attitude about the border, he pushed the administration to plan for the end of covid-driven immigration restrictions known as Title 42. After last summer’s executive order to tighten border restrictions, Gallego said it was “a step in the right direction,” but also emphasized the need to “hire more Border Patrol agents, fix our broken asylum system and keep our communities safe.”

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Gallego warns Democrats not to treat Latinos as a monolith. “Not all immigrants are the same. Not all the people that cross the border have the same experience, and even within those communities they don’t all think about them themselves the same way,” he said. An undocumented immigrant working here for decades does not see his situation as the same as that of a recent border crosser, even if it’s someone from the same country.

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Above all, Gallego talked to and listened to voters where they were — at rodeos, boxing matches and Mexican restaurants. He knew he had to reach voters who never follow political news. He told me that for just $400, he went to a minor league soccer match and handed out “Gallego” jerseys — letting fans spread his name. He advises Democrats to do such events consistently; it’s not enough to do one event “to check a box.”

https://wapo.st/3VQOIRn

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