Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) credited his pitch to voters about economic concerns and the border crisis with helping him garner an edge over his Republican rival, Kari Lake.
In a Monday appearance on ABC’s The View, Gallego said his election win in November centered on Arizonians struggling with inflation and the border crisis.
“The reason I was able to kind of understand what was happening is growing up Latino and working those work sites and working overtime just to help out my family. I understood the frustration I was hearing out in the community,” Gallego explained.
“We were focused right away on the cost of everything,” he continued. “Groceries, rent, but even, you know, being out there and talking to not just my Republican friends.”
The Arizona Democrat said he spoke to Latinos who were “frustrated about the border.”
“We started talking about how, ‘You know what? Something is going on at the border that is different than what people experienced in the past,’” the congressman said. “We have to focus on this and talk about solutions, and we did it over and over.”
Gallego is a five-term House member, having represented Arizona’s 7th and 3rd Congressional Districts since 2015. He ran against Lake in the 2024 U.S. senatorial election.
“We went all over the state, and Arizona is a big state, you know? We went to some places that haven’t seen anyone, even asked for the respect of someone’s vote,” he said.
Gallego told The View hosts that he went to places where no one had “asked for their vote in decades,” which included a tribe in northern Arizona.
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“We wanted to earn people’s respect. We wanted them to know that we may not agree with you 100% of the time, but I will be there to fight for you because I know what you’ve gone through, and I feel it in my core every day,” he said.
He became Arizona’s first Latino U.S. senator by defeating Lake and replacing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), who left the Democratic Party to become an independent in 2022 and decided against running for a second term in a three-way race.
