Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego had the right stuff to win a Senate race by two points in a swing state that VP Harris lost by five points.

Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego had the right stuff to win his Senate race by two percentage points in a swing state that Vice President Kamala Harris lost by five points. In January, Gallego will become Arizona’s first Latino U.S. senator.

His campaign may offer some lessons for Democrats reeling from the presidential election results and the drop off in support among working-class voters, including Latino men.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Gallego said that Democrats need to relate to the voters they’re asking to trust them. The AP wrote.

“What’s most important is for you as a candidate to be able to connect with everyday voters and make sure they understand in you and see in you that you are gonna fight for them,” Gallego said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be the same story as me, but somehow you need to be able to connect and to be able to do it an authentic way.”

Voters need to believe that Democrats are for the working class over elites and small businesses over large corporations, he added.

“We need to be able to go back to our economic roots where we are literally known and understood as being for working families,” Gallego said.

One thing that Gallego got right was the importance of focusing on voters’ concerns about the economy, including the spike in the price of eggs. And he knew exactly how to frame the issue before, during and after his campaign.

As families prepare for the holidays, Senator-elect Gallego, in a press release last week, said he had written a letter to  U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urging him to take “immediate action” to prevent the spread of avian influenza, which he said has “caused a sharp rise in egg and dairy prices.”

His press release quoted Glenn Hickman, the president of Hickman’s Family Farms in Buckeye, Ariz., the largest egg company in the Southwest, who called for the immediate emergency approval of bovine and avian vaccines, and their mandated use. Hickman also thanked Gallego for his efforts.

“Arizona farmers are facing rising costs, and Arizonans can’t afford more price hikes,” Gallego said in his letter to Vilsack.

And he concluded:

“Preventing further spread of the avian flu will not only protect the domestic egg, poultry, and dairy industries, it will keep down grocery costs and protect the health and safety of all Arizonans. It is truly in all of our best interests to work together on a bipartisan basis to prevent further avian influenza spread.”

What’s noteworthy is that back in January 2023, just before he announced his Senate candidacy to challenge Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, Gallego also wrote a letter to Vilsack expressing his concern about what the sharp rise in egg prices means for low-income families and asking what the USDA intends to do to combat the avian flu epidemic without punishing farmers.

Now what are the odds that the Trump administration will  botch its response to the avian flu outbreak as it did with the COVID-19 pandemic, especially if anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump has nominated conservative lawyer Brooke Rollins, president of the America First Policy Institute think tank, to be his agriculture secretary.

Gallego has shown how Democrats can frame the issue to use it against Republicans in the 2026 midterms if egg and dairy prices again spike.

So let’s look at the Arizona election results. Trump carried the state by 52% to 47% over Harris — giving him a margin of 187,000 votes. But Gallego won by 50% to 48% over Republican Kari Lake, a margin of slightly over 80,500 votes.

The Associated Press reported:

AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 4,000 voters in Arizona, shows Gallego won Hispanic men against Lake, even though Harris and Trump split them in Arizona.

Young men of all races and ethnicities broke for Trump in the presidential race but were evenly divided between Lake and Gallego in the Senate contest, according to AP VoteCast.

Overall, about 1 in 10 Trump voters split their ticket to vote for Gallego, while very few Harris voters also chose Lake.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Gallego dismissed the idea that Latinos had drifted rightward because they were unwilling to vote for a Black woman. He noted that Latinos “consistently vote for Black candidates and women candidates all the time” More than 70 percent of Latinos voted for Barack Obama in 2012, and 66 percent voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“The reflexive reaction from more of our progressive base is that it must be that they’re just anti-women and they’re antigay. That’s got to be it. I don’t know why they want to run to that … when the easier solution is raise wages, make them feel better about the opportunities that they have to live the American Dream.”

“That’s the actual answer,” he added.

Now Gallego did have an advantage in that he was running against Lake, an election denier who described  herself as “Trump in heels” during her failed 2022 gubernatorial campaign. And Lake derided the late Arizona Sen. John McCain and his supporters, driving some anti-MAGA Republicans, including the senator’s son Jim McCain, to endorse Gallego. Gallego’s support for reproductive freedoms also helped him gain support among suburban white voters.

It’s not surprising that Gallego, the son of Colombian and Mexican immigrants, out performed Harris among Latino voters, especially among Latino men. It obviously helped that Gallego is a Latino man from a working-class background. After receiving his B.A. from Harvard in international relations in 2004, he enlisted in the Marine reserves and was deployed to Iraq in a battalion that suffered the most casualties of any U.S. unit in the war.

Last Spring, Gallego introduced himself with this campaign ad that effectively wove together his biography with a pro-working class message.

But as The New York Times noted Gallego “has long warned against relying solely on identity politics to win over Latinos.” In 2022, he appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher”  to admonish Democrats for using the gender-neutral word “Latinx” to describe Latin Americans.

“It’s something that’s used largely by white liberals and a small amount of Latinos, but largely it’s to satisfy white liberals. … I love my culture. My language is part of my culture, and I’m not going to have someone change that.”

As a Congressman representing a deep blue. heavily Latino Phoenix-area district, Gallego was an outspoken member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He even hurled expletives at Republicans like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in his Tweets.

But as he eyed a statewide Senate run, he let his membership in the Progressive Caucus lapse and positioned himself toward the center, which Lake failed to do.

Gallego also chose wisely when he selected New Deal Strategies, a woman-owned consulting firm which doesn’t take corporate clients and emphasizes the need not just to elect more Democrats but also “to elect better Democrats.” It’s the same firm that worked on John Fetterman’s successful Senate campaign in another swing state, Pennsylvania. 

The New York Times wrote:

Mr. Gallego devoted significant resources to courting Latino men in a way that many voters and strategists said felt authentic. And he was quicker than many Democrats to embrace tough stances on the migrant crisis and to speak directly to blue-collar workers’ frustrations with high prices, even as traditional economic indicators were positive.

It’s worth looking at some more of Gallego’s campaign ads. What’s interesting is that none of the ads featured mention Lake’s name.

This one addressed voters’ concerns about inflation, In the ad, Gallego said, “I know how hard you’re working, where your wages just haven’t kept up with costs. And that’s not your fault.”

And this one dealt with immigration and the migrant crisis.

On his campaign website, Gallego put forth his immigration policy. He debunked Republican efforts to depict border communities as “war zones.” But he acknowledged that “we are facing a serious crisis” and stressed the need for “smart ways to keep our border secure, allow for a prosperous cross-border economy, reform a broken immigration system, and stop the flow of fentanyl into our communities.”

Gallego has strongly opposed Trump’s proposal to declare a national emergency and use the military to help carry out mass deportations.

“I don’t think Arizonans or Americans in general want to replace the chaos at the border with chaos in our communities,” Gallego told MSNBC.

And in The New York Times interview, Gallego said that he doesn’t believe Republicans will have popular support to carry out mass deportations.

“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 (Republicans).”

But Gallego said it would be a mistake for people on the left to shame Latino voters by saying “We told you so” if the worst happens, because that could backfire and cost support.

Gallego told Arizona TV station NBC 12 News that one thing his campaign recognized is “that Latino voters were swing voters from Day 1.”

His campaign found untraditional and creative ways to reach out to Latino voters, especially men. The Washington Post wrote that Gallego was a judge at a tamale festival. hired a local business owner to cater tacos for plant workers getting off the overnight shift, hosted boxing watch parties, organized lowrider car shows, concerts and closed his campaign with a Mexican rodeo.

The New York Times wrote:

In an interview, Mr. Gallego said the Democratic Party had failed to address the deep-seated anxiety that Latino men felt over rising prices, which left them unable to provide for their families no matter how much harder they worked.

“Latino men feel like their job is to provide security for their family — economic security and physical security,” he said. “And when that is compromised, they start looking around.”

He added that Democrats had failed to connect the dots on how legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was improving people’s lives.

He told the Times:

“Nobody gives a [expletive] about infrastructure. Sorry ... 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."

Gallego said that he did successfully use identity politics in his campaign, with a focus on his background, but he also stressed his desire to help families by lowering costs.

“You could use identity politics to connect, but you’ve got to deliver an economic message at the end,” Gallego told the Times. “Right now, there’s these two warring camps, and they’re both wrong. You’re going to have to do both.”