One of the few bright spots for Democrats was the Senate race in Arizona. My colleagues Jennifer Medina and Kellen Browning spoke with the Harvard-educated veteran with a working-class background who pulled off a win there, even as Vice President Kamala Harris lost the state. — Jess Bidgood
How to win Latino voters, according to a Democrat who did
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This month, Democrats suffered deep losses up and down the ballot, largely because voters who have long been essential to their coalition defected from the party. Ruben Gallego found a way to keep them. Gallego, an Arizona Democrat who has built a progressive brand over nearly a decade in Congress, won his state’s Senate race by two percentage points, even as Vice President Kamala Harris lost by 5.5 percentage points. During his campaign, he found novel ways to reach the Latino and working-class voters who have deserted other Democrats, furious at a party they believe abandoned their concerns. Now, some Democrats are pointing to Gallego, who turned 45 today, as an example of what the party can do to win back these voters. In an interview for a story we published this morning about his campaign, the senator-elect told us where he took his message, why he believes Latino men moved away from Democrats and exactly what he thinks of Democrats’ attempts to talk up their legislative achievements. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. There is a reckoning in the Democratic Party about losing working-class voters without a college degree. What advice do you have for your colleagues in Congress about winning them back? You have to have a very broad message of the American dream and a standard of living that they want to earn. They’re sick of working so hard and not making it. They’re sick of working hard and feeling stressed out. It’s all these things that are very psychological. But we have to be able to paint the bigger picture of what you get when you vote for a Democrat. And until you paint the bigger picture and not get into this kind of nitty-gritty policy world, which we do a lot, you’re going to have problems. And we have to reach out to these men and women because they’re not always going to be reading The New York Times. No offense. And sometimes they’re not even watching local TV. So this is why we were very intentional about getting out of our normal routine of how we reach out to voters. What about Latino men, specifically, who moved away from Democrats in a striking way for the second presidential cycle in a row? Latino men feel like their job is to provide security for their family, economic security and physical security, and when that is compromised, they start looking around. What happened post-pandemic with inflation, Latino men felt that no matter what they did, they couldn’t get economic security for their family because the prices were so damn high. Mentally speaking, Latino men believe they could always work their way out of anything. Oh, if I want to buy this, I’ll just add extra hours or I’ll just cut here. I’ll just work here. And I think for the first time in a while, they felt that they weren’t doing that and they weren’t providing it. And the future, to them, seems bleaker also for the kids.
There were successes that Democrats could and did point to, like the infrastructure bill. Why don’t you think that worked? Nobody gives a [expletive] about infrastructure. Sorry. You know, they won’t let us say that in The New York Times. It’s a common good you don’t get credit for. Look, it is a good policy, but if you think it’s going to lead to good politics, it’s not and never has. And I don’t understand why we continue putting so much emphasis on it. Until people actually feel something — higher wages, lower costs, more security — you’re not going to get credit. Infrastructure is not going to do it. There’s all this debate in the Democratic circles about whether the party leaned too much on identity politics, and we’re wondering how you’re making sense of that. For some reason, people are putting on me that I didn’t run on identity politics. I did, but it was not just on identity. It was this idea of working-class Latinos. But also it had a far-reaching message across all other groups. If you just solely rely on identity but not the actual work and policy behind it, then you will lose. Because at some point these voters are like, OK, what are you offering me? What have you been offering me and what have you not? You’ve been delivering nothing for me the last couple of times, but great, I get to support you because you’re brown. But then I still can’t pay my rent. I’m still living at home. You want to know why there’s a lot of young men voting for Trump? Because most of them are still living at home, and a lot of them don’t want to be doing that. I was holding campaign events like a rodeo, but I was also talking about work and the dignity of work. I was at the lowrider shows and talking about increasing wages. You could use identity politics to connect, but you got to deliver an economic message at the end. How did you use identity politics, and how did you reach out to different demographic groups? We wanted you to know who I am. We invested heavily in my bio first — working-class kid, veteran, Marine, a father and a husband. Why is that? Because you can identify with someone on that list. We never said “congressman.” And you never said Harvard, where you went to college? It was always in my bio, which I think people are surprised by. I don’t have to hide it because I didn’t come from Ivy League pedigree. This is a kid from the ’hood making good. That always is going to sell, in my opinion. I know the pride that my whole community had when I got into Harvard. It was as if we had just discovered like a diamond or something.
How do you square your past opposition to anti-immigrant policies, like Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, the 2010 state measure that critics said legalized racial profiling, with your support for stricter policies at the border today? There’s nothing to square. Many Latinos were against SB 1070 and racial profiling. Sheriff Joe Arpaio abused pulling over our families for just looking brown. But at the same time, I believe there should be border security and Border Patrol. The Republicans believe that mass deportation really means mass deportations and that’s going to have popular support. I don’t believe that’s true. Right or wrong, what some of these Latinos voted for, in their minds, was dealing with the people that had just crossed the border, not the person that’s been here for 15 years. When the reality comes — and hopefully it doesn’t — but if it comes, I think there’s going to be very quick push back on them. The ones who voted for Trump, they came up with excuses like: “They’re not talking about me. They’re not talking about my grandma who is here still illegally. They won’t go after her.” Now, you could say whether that’s right or wrong, but that’s what they’re thinking. How would you reach out to those voters, assuming deportations happen? A lot of people on the left are already saying, “I told you so.” This attitude, “We told you so” — this is why you’re losing people like this. You’re not listening to them. You’re just trying to tell them how to vote. And this is how you end up losing more and more of them. You beat the Republican Kari Lake, a staunch Trump ally and a former news anchor. Will you take her interview requests, if she were hypothetically to return to local TV? I don’t know, I might! I said I would go everywhere and talk to everyone.
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