Will Ruben Gallego Lead Democrats Out of the Wilderness?

Freshman Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego was a rare bright spot for Democrats in an otherwise bleak 2024. In a year when Donald Trump won all seven battleground states and Democrats lost three Senate seats, Gallego defeated Republican Kari Lake in Arizona by 2.4 points—despite Trump carrying the state by 5.5 points in the presidential race. 

It’s little wonder, then, that Gallego’s name is routinely tossed around as a plausible 2028 presidential candidate. Just a few weeks after he took office, Gallego landed at No. 6 in a Washington Post article titled “The 12 Democrats who make the most sense for 2028.”

With just four months of experience in the upper chamber—and a decade in the House of Representatives—Gallego isn’t exactly playing coy about 2028 presidential ambitions. 

In an interview last week in his Senate office, The Dispatch asked Gallego if it was awkward to serve alongside another potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender from Arizona, Sen. Mark Kelly, who was on Kamala Harris’ VP shortlist last year. “I love him. I would not be here without him,” Gallego said of Kelly. “We are truly friends. We will never be in competition against each other. I was very lucky and smart not to run against him in 2020 because I would have gotten my ass kicked.” But Gallego did not offer the typical, perfunctory disputation of the notion that he might run for president in 2028. 

When the Washington Post asked him earlier this month about 2028 ambitions, Gallego said he was focused on the Senate and the birth of his third child due in June, but he hastened to add: “Babies get older.” While Gallego said he wasn’t thinking about a presidential bid, the Post reported that “multiple times” Gallego said he wasn’t thinking about it “right now.”

But a look at Gallego’s schedule and early moves in the Senate suggests he has an eye on 2028 right now. 

Earlier this month, he hosted a town hall in the key presidential battleground state of Pennsylvania. The stated purpose of the event was to campaign against a vulnerable Republican congressman in a swing district, but it also served as a venue for Gallego to test drive some 2028 messaging.

“What happened the last election is that we got so pure, and we kept so pure that we started kicking people out of the tent,” Gallego said in Pennsylvania. “It ends up there aren’t enough people in the tent to win elections.” As an example, he pointed to the way the party treated Bernie Sanders supporter Joe Rogan. “We had Joe Rogan. We canceled Joe Rogan years ago,” he said. “Democrats don’t want to admit this. … We did this to ourselves.” Gallego went on to note his success in a state with “330,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.” In order to win, “We’re going to have to have alliances with people that we may not agree with 100 percent of the time, right?”

A few days after the town hall, Gallego introduced an immigration proposal that emphasized improving border security, fixing a broken asylum process, and reforming the legal immigration system—and then went on Fox and Friends to sell it.

In his interview with The Dispatch last week, Gallego was more than willing to credit Trump with nothing short of a “victory” at the southern border in his few months in office. “I think the president has done well with securing the border. Let’s put a victory on that, and then let’s figure out how to, in an organized way, deal with the 9 to 12 million people that are here illegally,” Gallego said. 

Why was the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border so high during the Biden administration and so low in the first few months of Trump’s second term? “Because President Biden started, and then Trump continued it, with changing who can actually ask for asylum,” Gallego replied. Gallego noted that Biden “could have acted earlier” than summer 2024, when he finally took executive actions on asylum. Trump’s continuation of that policy and “then adding more border security really has, to his credit, brought President Biden’s number [of illegal border crossings] even lower, to the lowest,” Gallego said.

The senator wants his party to recognize the value of tighter border control. “We as Democrats should recognize that bringing illegal border crossings down to zero is a good value for the country, and what we do is figure out how [to make it] sustainable, because what the president’s doing is not sustainable,” he said. “It’s really expensive.” In particular, using the military at the southern border is too expensive and those forces ought to be replaced by civilian border patrol agents, according to Gallego. Is he critical of any other Trump immigration policies? “I disagree with the mass deportation policy, of separating families, taking away people’s legal rights to be here, and basically trying to figure out how to speed to get them out of here, because he just wants deportation numbers [higher],” he said.

But Gallego’s plan also breaks with Democratic Party consensus on a pathway to citizenship: In 2022, then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said “our ultimate goal” is to have a path to citizenship for “for all 11 million, or however many undocumented there are here.” While Gallego’s proposal would provide a path to citizenship for immigrants who came here illegally as children and those who are the spouses of U.S. citizens, it would not provide a pathway to citizenship for all illegal immigrants. Some, he noted, only want permanent status to work legally, not full citizenship. Those without valid asylum claims, he said, “will not be able to legally stay in this country.”

Gallego’s plan is far from satisfying for immigration restrictionists. Mark Krikorian, an immigration hawk at the Center for Immigration Studies, characterized Gallego’s plan to The Dispatch as the “same old amnesty-and-increased-immigration approach that’s been rightly rejected by Congress over and over again.” Gallego’s proposal calls for lifting current caps on legal immigration but doesn’t provide specific numbers. The senator told The Dispatch it’s “better to work with the industries and even the labor groups to figure out” what the appropriate number is based on “the economy and the labor market.” David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute sees a lot to like in Gallego’s approach: While many are focused on the border and addressing migrants already here, reforming the legal immigration system “is exactly what we need right now,” Bier said.

For now, Gallego’s immigration framework, which has not been turned into actual legislation, is more interesting as a matter of politics than policy—another sign of how he has rebranded himself as a moderate after being a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus during his time in the House. Gallego and other Arizona Democrats successfully chased Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema out of the party over her opposition to abolishing the filibuster and other heresies, but Gallego simultaneously moved toward the center on some issues. 

When pressed on his ideological journey, Gallego suggested he hasn’t changed that much and has always been more moderate on immigration and more hawkish on defense than other progressives. Gallego previously told Axios his membership in the Progressive Caucus lapsed because the dues went up. 

“The one area that I think I have changed on, to be honest, was this idea that immigration reform has to be full comprehensive immigration reform. And in order for us to negotiate with Republicans, we will give the Republicans border security and in return they will give us immigration reform,” Gallego told The Dispatch. The comprehensive approach is “not actually based on trying to pass a bill—more to appease these different varying factions.”

Of course, that’s not the only political view that’s changed for Gallego. Back in 2017, he was still condemning “Trump’s stupid, dumb border wall,” but his recent proposal calls for “border barriers in strategic locations.” A longtime member of the Medicare for All Caucus in the House, he dropped his co-sponsorship of the bill in 2023 and no longer supports it. “The need for Medicare for All, I think, is just not there anymore, nor is it even popular,” Gallego told The Dispatch. He pointed to improvements in the Affordable Care Act that led to greater insurance coverage as a reason for dropping his support for Medicare for All, adding that he still thinks Medicare should be expanded to cover dental care and hearing and that Medicaid should be “adjusted to cover more working-class Americans.”

The issue of transgender rights is another area where some Democrats—such as Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and California Gov. Gavin Newsom—think the party has gone too far to the left, particularly on the issue of women’s and girls’ sports. Gallego now says the issue is ultimately a local—not federal—one. 

“As a parent of a daughter, I think it’s legitimate that parents are worried about the safety of their daughters, and I think it’s legitimate for us to be worried also about fair competition. And I think the parents of these trans children also are worried legitimately about the health and wellness of their kids,” Gallego said. 

“There are some sports that some of these trans children should not be playing,” he said, adding that it should be up to “local institutions” like school boards or associations to figure out the games and sports where “there should be a separation” based on biology. He emphasized that the message to children who identify as transgender needs to be compassionate: “Hey, listen, we love you. We want you to be part of our community, but this is just the one place you can’t play, and let’s find other activities for you to be involved.”

Gallego’s emphasis on local institutions deciding contentious issues related to transgender rights seems to be at odds with the Equality Act, the sweeping LGBT rights proposal backed by every Democrat in Congress. It passed the House in both 2019 and 2021 but never made it out of the Senate. If ultimately enacted, the bill would add “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” as protected classes under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and it explicitly states that “an individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.” While the Equality Act does not explicitly amend Title IX of the Civil Rights Act—the section addressing gender equality in education—some legal scholars have argued the bill would nevertheless prohibit schools from keeping sports teams reserved exclusively for biological females. When asked whether the Equality Act needs to be modified in any way, Gallego replied he’d “have to go back and look at” it. “When we passed the Equality Act, I think we were trying to again establish the largest amount of umbrella,” he said, and insisted competing interests can “coexist.” 

It is of course far too early to guess whether Gallego’s moves toward the center will set him up well for 2028 if he chooses to run. There’s no telling whether the Democratic primary voters will be in the mood for Clintonian triangulation or a staunchly progressive fighter in a few years. While Gallego was calling for border security in May, progressive New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sending out emails calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “rogue agency that should not exist.” 

Gallego insists he’s all for fighting—but wants to do so more strategically. When Trump first invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport accused gang members without any due process to a brutal jail in El Salvador, Gallego warned that Trump was setting a “trap” for Democrats. “He wants us to fight him on Venezuelans, probably most of them are gang members and Venezuela is not taking them back, so El Salvador is,” Gallego told Adrian Carrasquillo of The Bulwark in March. “The real problem is when he’s gonna use this on the mother who has U.S.-born citizen kids and skipping their due process. The real problem is going to be for the Dreamer that hasn’t done anything wrong.” Gallego told The Dispatch it’s important to defend due process, but Democrats shouldn’t “just jump and automatically assume that, number one, that the person that you’re advocating for is someone that people can empathize with.”

There are a number of outstanding questions about Gallego’s success in Arizona last year. How much did it really have to do with his moves to the center? How much did it have to do with the weakness of his Republican opponent? And how much did it simply have to do with his own backstory? The answer is likely all of the above. 

“Gallego was certainly running against a weakened opponent in Kari Lake, but he was very successful at setting the tone of the campaign very early,” Jessica Taylor of the Cook Political Report told The Dispatch. “He had a very compelling biography.” 

As the son of Latino immigrants, Gallego grew up working-class and was admitted to Harvard, but he was kicked out after his freshman year for poor grades and “underage drinking and stuff like that.” With plans to apply for readmission to Harvard after a year, he enlisted in a Marine Corps Reserves infantry unit in 2000. The day after graduating from infantry school, he was “already on a Greyhound bus going back to Harvard,” Gallego said. He ultimately graduated from Harvard in 2004 and served a combat tour in Iraq the next year. 

Gallego outperformed Kamala Harris among all groups of voters in Arizona, but did disproportionately better among Latinos. According to exit polling, Gallego performed 8 points better among white voters and 12 points better among Latino voters than Harris.

So, who exactly are the Gallego-Trump voters in Arizona? “They’re more Gallego than Trump,” Gallego told The Dispatch. “They liked me, but they voted for Trump, and they largely voted for Trump because of economic reasons. They were hurting because of the economy, because of inflation, and they trusted me that I understood the problems, and they trusted me on border security and immigration.” 

Gallego rarely misses an opportunity to burnish his working-class credentials. When asked to name a favorite book or two, he eventually settled on Of Mice and Men and The Jungle because he identifies “a lot with the working class men in both of those books.” (His initial answer was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, but thought better of it because “that’s what every f—ing nerd says.”)

Arizona’s senior Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, who ran a couple points ahead of Joe Biden in 2020, said he isn’t quite sure who the Kelly-Trump and Gallego-Trump voters are. “I don’t meet them very often, but they’re out there somewhere,” he told The Dispatch. Asked what’s remarkable about his colleague, Kelly cited Gallego’s service in the Marines. “The guy was in the Marine Corps unit that had the highest casualties since like the Vietnam war,” said Kelly, who served as a Navy fighter pilot during the first Gulf War. “I think we’re the only state that has two combat veterans representing the state.”

During his time at Harvard, Gallego first crossed paths with Matthew Yglesias, the liberal writer and podcaster who has been pushing for the Democratic Party to move toward the center in recent years and headlined a Gallego fundraiser earlier this year. “What’s funny, obviously, is that he’s become a big moderate rising star even though he challenged Sinema from the left,” Yglesias told The Dispatch in an email. “But I think that’s what’s impressive about him—in an era when Democrats have been defined by a kind of groupthink and conformism, the basic ability and inclination to think for yourself and speak for yourself counts for a lot. He wasn’t the first influential Democrat to roll his eyes privately at ‘Latinx’ but he was the first to complain about it in public and open the door for others. He’s ambitious and impatient in a good way.”