How Ruben Gallego Threaded The Needle In Purple Arizona

When Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) announced he was running for Senate in Jan. 2023, taking on both Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a centrist Democrat-turned-independent, and a future Republican challenger, Republicans were practically rubbing their hands togetherin delight. A three-way general election would split non-GOP votes between Sinema and Gallego, they hoped.

Even after Sinema announced her decision not to seek re-election in March, some Republicans argued that Gallego’s progressive background would be a liability in a head-to-head match up with Republican Kari Lake, a former local TV anchor who ran for governor in 2022.

On Election Day, Gallego defeated Lake by 2.4 percentage points, even as President-elect Donald Trump took the state by just nearly 6 points.

Gallego’s victory was one of the Democratic Party’s greatest triumphs this election cycle. It is also a case study for how the same candidate can channel progressive anger at a Democratic turncoat and then move far enough to center to win in a purple state — all without abandoning his reasons for running in the first place.

Gallego caught some lucky breaks. Chief among them was the selection of Lake — a polarizing Trump supporter with a mile-long paper trail of anti-abortion remarks, in a state that voted decisively to protect abortion rights — as his Republican opponent.

But good fortune alone could not have secured a Senate seat.

Gallego had to reassure Arizonans he was a viable alternative to the status quo. That meant threading a very particular needle, running a campaign against Sinema that would help, rather than hurt, his chances against Lake in the general election. So he attacked Sinema from the left, but only in a narrow sense: by focusing on her corporate ties and depicting her as beholden to wealthy donors, rather than the people of Arizona. It was the sort of populist message that was tailor-made for a moment when inflation was top of mind.

“The point wasn’t to go to the left of Sinema,” recalled Rebecca Katz, a senior advisor to Gallego who helped engineer Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s win in 2022. “The point was to stand up for what Arizonans wanted.”

At the same time, he undercut more popular aspects of Sinema’s centrism, like a border security-centered approach to immigration, by co-opting them himself. He leaned into his own working-class upbringing and background as a combat veteran of the Iraq War to establish credibility as someone who would put pragmatic solutions above party and ideology. And while he is loath to admit it, he also took concrete measures to dissociate himself from the “progressive” label.

Gallego campaigned relentlessly for every vote across the state — a technique that proved especially fruitful with Latino men.

“Arizona is a center-right state. There’s no doubt about it. There are 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, and the only way a Democrat wins in Arizona is by building a really big coalition,” Gallego told HuffPost. “That means you have to get Republicans and independents. You have to get Democrats that maybe are disaffected. And I had 23 months to do it.”

Branding Sinema As An Out-Of-Touch Elite

Sinema was one of the highest-profile Democratic obstacles to pieces of Biden’s agenda (alongside now-independent Sen. Joe Manchin, who represents the much more Republican state of West Virginia). She theatrically voted against including the $15 minimum wage in a COVID-19 relief package; opposed getting rid of the filibuster, even for voting rights legislation; fought to limit the federal government’s power to negotiate prescription drug prices with drugmakers; and prevented the closure of a tax loophole for hedge fund managers.

By Sept. 2022, her favorability numbers were underwater with Arizona Democrats, signaling that she would have a hard time surviving a primary. Sinema responded in December 2022 by becoming an independent who still caucused with Senate Democrats.

Gallego, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus through the end of 2022, decided to attack Sinema as someone who was out of step with ordinary Arizonans, rather than hit her for not being progressive enough. Even before he made his Senate run official, he accused her of being excessively close to her “Wall Street friends.”

Once Gallego kicked off his campaign in January 2023, his rags-to-riches biography served as a compelling contrast with what he depicted as Sinema’s coziness with elite donors. In an announcement video that was more than three minutes long, Gallego tearfully described his experience of the American dream: growing up in poverty as the son of a single, immigrant mother; defying the odds to attend Harvard; serving in a Marine corps company that suffered some of the highest casualties of any in the Iraq War; and choosing public service to help struggling families like the one in which he was raised.

Gallego closed the video with a jab at Sinema that underscored his central campaign theme, without even mentioning her by name. “If you’re more likely to be meeting with the powerful than the powerless, you’re doing this job incorrectly,” he said.

Running On Border Security

At the same time, Gallego, a representative of solid-blue and majority-Latino parts of Phoenix, sought to emulate Sinema’s centrism on border security and immigration policy.

In May 2023, Gallego sent letters to top Biden administration officials warning that border communities were “unequipped” for the surge in migrants that would follow the expiration of pandemic-era rules restricting their entry, and he demanded additional resources from the federal government. Gallego would later get into a public fight with Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Administration when top officials there refused the congressman’s invitation to tour the border with him. He called on Biden to issue an emergency declaration about the southern border. And he endorsed the hawkish bipartisan border security bill that Sinema herself had negotiated with Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). (Trump’s objection to that legislation ultimately prevented it from coming up for a vote.)

“I think [Sinema] assumed he would be to the left of her there, but Ruben knew we needed real solutions on the border and thought the bill was the right thing to do for Arizona,” Katz said.

Perhaps sensing Gallego’s strength, Sinema announced she would not be running in March. That spared Gallego from a potentially treacherous three-way race.

But Gallego’s early efforts to convey urgency about border security laid the foundation for a general-election push with similar themes, making him one of the Democrats who most effectively undermined the GOP’s position on that issue. In advertisements about the border, Gallego cast himself as a pragmatist willing to both criticize Biden’s inaction and what he saw as the empty Republican demagoguery that led to the collapse of Sinema’s bipartisan compromise bill.

“Rather than fighting, we need Democrats and Republicans to work together to create real solutions,” he said in a border security ad that his campaign ran in both Spanish and English. In that spot, he emphasized his immigrant roots and promised to defend Dreamers — while also discussing the need to beef up surveillance technology.

Gallego told HuffPost his moderation on the border stemmed from changing circumstances on the ground. He believed the recent influx of asylum seekers at the border — a wave that peaked in Dec. 2023 with over 300,000 people processed — included a significant number of economic migrants who used asylum law as a loophole to enter.

“The system was clearly, clearly being abused — abused because they knew that they would not have a court date for five to seven years,” Gallego said. “When you start to hear working-class Latinos that generally are more moderate when it comes to immigration, say, ‘This is a problem. I don’t like the chaos,’ it was very easy for me to bring that reality into politics.”

A Pivot To The Center

Gallego and his team are reluctant to play up how much he moved to the center. Asked about his efforts to memory-hole his progressive affiliations in the House, Gallego rejected the terms “progressive” and “moderate” as “D.C. talk.”

“People in Arizona just want to know: Are you going to fight for me, or are you not going to fight for me?” he said.

But Gallego quietly let his membership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus lapse at the end of 2022, a fact that not-so-coincidentally became public after Sinema officially withdrew from the race in March. Asked to explain his reasons for leaving, Gallego’s campaign referred HuffPost to his remarks at the time, when he said he left because caucus membership dues had gone up.

Gallego had also repeatedly been a co-sponsor of a longtime effort to create a single-payer health care system, called “Medicare for All,” starting in 2017. When the latest Medicare for All bill was introduced in 2023, though, he did not sign on.

Gallego told HuffPost he no longer supports Medicare for All because he has been impressed by the insurance coverage gains in recent years under the Affordable Care Act.

“I was always for any approach to get more people coverage,” he said. “And when I saw a better approach, with the recent advances of the ACA, I decided to stick with that push.”

Perhaps the biggest sign that Gallego was prepared to gore progressive sacred cows came when he secured the endorsement of the Arizona Police Association in August. The APA, an umbrella group for 25 local police unions, endorsed Trump for president but backed Gallego for Senate, citing his support for federal public safety funding.

The day after getting the group’s endorsement, Gallego sent a letter to the Department of Justice objecting to its use of a consent decree to impose stricter oversight on the Phoenix police department. The consent decree agreement was the result of a DOJ report documenting patterns of racial bias and brutality, but the APA decried the report as a “smear campaign.”

The timing of Gallego’s letter raised some eyebrows. But Gallego’s Senate campaign denied at the time that he had committed to opposing the consent decree in order to secure the group’s endorsement. “There was no agreement,” Hannah Goss, Gallego’s communications director, told a local TV news outlet. “Ruben Gallego has a record of fighting for Arizona’s law enforcement in Congress and is proud to have the support of the Arizona Police Association.”

Gallego took heat from progressives and civil rights groups for the move, but it also helped neutralize Lake’s claims that Gallego was an anti-police radical. Gallego touted the endorsement in an early October TV ad that featured a uniformed police officer praising Gallego for supporting law enforcement funding.

“He’s certainly not an anti-police guy, so I think that was very helpful for him,” said Barry Markson, a registered Republican attorney who hosts a popular centrist radio show in Arizona.

Gallego’s focus on his military service likewise created a permission structure for conservative-leaning independents and moderate Republicans to vote for him.

In a general-election ad blitz that began in March, Gallego introduced himself to the broader electorate as a veteran of the hard-hit“Lucky Lima” company who returned with a commitment to do right by veterans back home. Gallego, who has been open about his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, was an original co-sponsor of a law that provides health care benefits for veterans affected by the military’s use of toxic burn pits and introduced a bill that would prevent the military from clawing back separation for veterans who qualify for disability benefits. He also invited two of fellow survivors of Lucky Lima company to attend the March state of the union address as his guests.

Gallego’s progressive past was a “huge concern” for Yasser Sanchez, a conservative immigration lawyer in Mesa and former GOP Latino organizer who left the Republican Party out of disgust with Trump. Sanchez planned to vote for Gallego no matter what, thanks to Lake’s support of baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election, but before endorsing the Democrat publicly, he needed assurances that Gallego was less partisan.

Sanchez recounted how Gallego allayed his doubts in private by underlining a country-over-party ethos honed in the military. “He talked about his military service — how he didn’t care what political party people were in, as long as they were working for the common cause, which was to get the mission done,” said Sanchez, who Gallego would include on a list of Republican endorsers.

At the same time, Gallego continued to run on plans to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, as well as crack down on wealthy tax cheats and corporate price gouging.

Gallego’s messaging on inflation, in particular, required a deft touch. He managed to show empathy for ordinary families and run against the status quo, while touting his vote for the Inflation Reduction Act’s prescription drug cost-lowering provisions — one of Biden’s signature legislative accomplishments.

A TV ad from April exemplified that approach. Gallego begins by bluntly telling Arizonans struggling to pay bills, “That’s not your fault” — a line he personally insisted on including, according to Katz.

“In Congress, I fought to finally lower the cost of prescriptions by holding pharmaceutical companies accountable,” he says in the ad, without mentioning Biden. “In the Senate, I’ll keep fighting big corporations so hardworking Arizonans can breathe a little easier.”

Gallego also did not join other Democrats in tough races — like Rep. Jared Golden of Maine and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio — in sitting out the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.

Instead, Gallego used his speech at the convention to highlight his sacrifices and those of other Democratic veterans, who he invited onstage with him. It was meant as a point of contrast with Trump, who mocked the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a wounded Vietnam War veteran, and who reportedly called all military service members killed in action “losers.”

“John McCain was an American hero. Show some respect!” Gallego said.

The primetime TV appearance paid off. In the 24 hours following the speech, Gallego raised $1 million.

An Extreme Opponent

Gallego’s expressions of reverence for McCain, however genuine, were part of a deliberate strategy to take advantage of a divide among Arizona Republicans. McCain represented the state’s old, and greatly diminished, GOP establishment — a faction characterized by national security hawkishness, a commitment to propriety, and skepticism of the xenophobia and fact-free populism of Trump and his loyalists.

Lake, by contrast, is one of Trump’s most uncompromising disciples. She not only maintains that Trump won the 2020 election, but also claims to have won her own unsuccessful governor’s race in 2022. Lake was still engaged in litigation to overturn the 2022 results through Election Day in 2024.

What’s more, Lake specifically bashed McCain and the Arizona Republicans who identify with his brand of politics. “We don’t have any McCain Republicans here do we? Well, get the hell out!” Lake said at a 2022 campaign event, where attendees booed the mention of McCain’s name.

“Ruben benefited from having yet another MAGA, extreme-type candidate running against him,” Markson said. “For at least some percentage of Republicans, they just don’t like her.”

A number of those McCain Republicans, including former McCain aides Paul Hickman and Bettina Nava, became outspoken Gallego backers.

In a state where a majority of voters support abortion rights — a ballot initiative enshrining abortion access into the state constitution got nearly 62% of the vote on Election Day — Lake’s history of anti-abortion comments and positions were also a major liability.

After previously expressing approval for Arizona’s pre-statehood ban on the practice, which included no exceptions for rape or incest, Lake struggled to backpedal. And numerous audio clips of Lake disparaging abortion, including one in which she calls it “almost a genocide,” made it into one of Gallego’s many TV ads about Lake’s abortion stance.

“If we had run a generic Republican against him, he would have gotten smashed,” said a national Republican strategist, who requested anonymity to speak without authorization. “Kari Lake just sucks up all the oxygen with her shit. She did not do a good job making the race about him.”

Democrats knew that Lake would be a weak candidate. She simultaneously had sky-high name recognition from her gubernatorial run and an unfavorable image as an election denier, according to Gallego’s pollster, Margie Omero. The ads mostly aimed to remind voters that Lake also had a history of being a hardline abortion rights opponent, because a “lot of voters didn’t necessarily hear her recently on abortion,” Omero said.

‘Go Everywhere’

But Lake’s extremism did not in itself ensure a Gallego victory. After all, Trump carried the state despite having similar baggage, and Democrats failed to either unseat any incumbent Arizona House Republicans or take control of either of the state’s two legislative chambers, where the GOP holds narrow majorities.

And Gallego excelled with a number of key demographic and regional groups that eluded Harris, uniting a coalition of working-class voters, college graduates and just enough disaffected Republicans. Gallego’s strong performance with Latino men, a demographic that veered sharply to the right this cycle, is especially striking. He picked up 64% of Latino men and 58% of Latina women, even as Harris received 55% of Latino men and 54% of Latina women.

Surely Gallego’s identity as a Latino man played a role in his appeal.

But he also made a real effort to appeal to Latinos in spaces where they felt comfortable. His campaign commissioned a corrido, or Mexican folk ballad, about Gallego that the campaign shared on social media. He screened a Canelo Álvarez boxing match live at a boxing gym in Glendale, offering attendees free tacos. He distributed breakfast tacos and coffee to union laborers arriving for the early shift at a job site, visited low-rider shops, and held a get-out-the-vote Mexican-style rodeo event the Friday night before the election.

“These are the things that we did that were essential to bringing these men back into the fold and for me to build trust for them, because they knew that, ‘Hey, this guy actually understands me,’” Gallego told HuffPost.

It helps that overwhelmingly male, working-class settings are not new for Gallego. He recalls working construction to make money as a young person, and joining family members around the TV to watch a boxing match after a hard day’s work.

“I get to wear fancy suits and stuff. But for most of my life, or at least a lot of my life, I had to work with my hands. I had to bring money home to take care of my family, my sisters, my mom,” he said. “And I remember the pain that a lot of the men in my family felt when the economy was bad, or the pain that they felt when something went wrong and they couldn’t provide for the family.”

Gallego’s outreach to Latinos was part of a broader strategy of taking no region or demographic group for granted. He crisscrossed the state to meet with even small groups of voters in person.

Eric Chalmers, a senior adviser to Gallego, characterized the approach as “go everywhere and talk to everyone” — not just for tactical reasons, but because Gallego ran on the idea of reaching out to people who have been overlooked.

Gallego’s travel-heavy schedule helped him connect with remote Native American tribes, in particular. He flew to southern Utah in April to meet with the 300-member Kaibab Paiute tribe in a remote part of northern Arizona accessible only through a tiny Utah airport, and in October, he hiked down the Grand Canyon to meet with the Havasupai people.

Of course, Gallego had years to reintroduce himself to voters on his own terms. Asked to comment on why Harris fell short in his state, Gallego pointed to the compressed nature of her 100-day campaign.

“I had 23 months to talk to Arizonans over and over again, so they [got] to know me. And even though she’s the vice president, I don’t think people got to know her,” he said. “The president was universally unpopular. They just attached all the negatives that President Biden had to her, and she did not have enough time to create her own personality, and her own brand.”