How Ruben Gallego outperformed Harris, dominated with Latinos and won Arizona
Democratic Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego says he won Arizona by appealing to Latinos, especially men, and taking seriously their economic concerns.
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.”
Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., is hugged by a supporter outside a polling place on Election Day in Guadalupe, Ariz.Mario Tama / Getty Images file“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.”
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