n the afternoon of January 6, 2021, as election deniers armed with Tasers and tomahawks overran the US Capitol, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) handed his colleague and shut buddy Eric Swalwell a pen. “Right here,” he stated to the California Democrat. “Stick this of their neck in the event that they get near you.”
The Marine veteran, who’d seen fight in Iraq, leaped on a desk and started issuing directions to different panicked lawmakers, exhibiting them the right way to don the gasoline masks secured below their chairs: “Tear gasoline is not going to kill you. However it’s necessary to stay calm. In the event you hyperventilate, chances are you’ll move out.” If crucial, Gallego instructed himself, he may use his personal pen as a weapon to take a extra deadly one from a rioter.
Three years later, the battle for American democracy continues, and Gallego, locked in probably the most pivotal contests of the 2024 election, is once more making an attempt to carry the road. Together with shut matchups in Ohio and Montana, his Senate race in Arizona for the seat Kyrsten Sinema is vacating could possibly be one in all a handful that determine management of the higher chamber and, with it, the way forward for our republic. Donald Trump, dealing with 88 felony counts, has promised to usher in MAGA on steroids if reelected, together with mass deportation and sweeping bans on gender-affirming care. A Democratic-led Senate can be one of many final fortifications in opposition to his agenda.
As if to additional underscore the stakes, Gallego’s opponent is the previous TV information anchor turned Trump sycophant Kari Lake. A prolific purveyor of conspiracy theories, Lake claims not solely that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump but in addition that she was robbed of the Arizona governorship in her 2022 race. If Trumpism is akin to a faith, Lake views herself as one in all its martyrs. “You possibly can name us extremists. You possibly can name us home terrorists,” she declared throughout one marketing campaign occasion in 2022. “You understand who else was known as lots of names his entire life? Jesus.”
Lake’s loss two years in the past is only one indicator that Arizona is popping away from Trump-style conservatism. Although Trump received the state by 3.6 % in 2016, he misplaced it in 2020 by about half of a %. In 2022, all the main statewide candidates Trump endorsed had been defeated. However the state is definitely not a Democratic stronghold, both. Of roughly 4.1 million registered voters, there are some 236,000 extra Republicans and 197,000 extra independents than there are Democrats. To win, Gallego “has to enchantment to a cross part of voters,” says former Arizona Democratic Occasion Chair Jim Pederson, “notably average Republicans.”
Doing so would require Gallego to stroll a nuanced line on the border disaster; the disaster raises drug and crime issues for a lot of Republican voters, however migrants additionally gas the state’s economic system. The high-profile race may also pressure Gallego to confront controversies from his previous. The identical wartime experiences that ready him for January 6 left him with PTSD that has led to offended outbursts and the collapse of his first marriage whereas his then-wife was pregnant with their youngster.
Gallego’s psychological well being struggles could also be good fodder for his opponent to leverage in opposition to him, however his allies counter that his historical past of hardships is just not a legal responsibility—it might even be an asset.
“I used to be on the ground with him on January 6. I used to be sitting proper subsequent to him,” Swalwell says. “And I noticed, really, not anyone with a mood, however anyone very a lot in management.”
Gallego by no means had it simple. Each of his mother and father immigrated to america as teenagers, his father from Mexico and his mother from Colombia. His mother and father divorced across the time Gallego was in junior excessive. His now-estranged dad, who labored in development, would ultimately be convicted on felony drug expenses. His mother raised Gallego and his three sisters in a small condo outdoors of Chicago, the place Gallego slept on the lounge ground and helped the household make ends meet by way of odd jobs as a line prepare dinner, a janitor, and a cashier. From his makeshift bed room, he plotted an escape route out of poverty by method of a faculty schooling. His dream college, Harvard, in the end provided him a scholarship.
In Cambridge, Gallego had a dorm room with a mattress—one thing he hadn’t had in six years. He majored in worldwide relations, pondering he may work for the State Division in the future, and skilled some tradition shock. “We each had been discovering our method on this new setting,” says Shailesh Sahay, Gallego’s fraternity brother and future greatest man, who can be the son of immigrants. “We each went to public excessive faculties and form of socialized in a traditional public college method. To distinction that, there have been children like Jared Kushner at school with us. His funds for going out on Saturday evening was considerably increased than our funds was.”
However Gallego may hobnob with anybody, buddies say. “Was he completely the good child at school? No, however he undoubtedly knew lots of people,” says Jean-Pierre Jacquet, one other Harvard classmate and fraternity brother in Sigma Chi. He “had lots of self-confidence, which is, you realize, commonplace in Cambridge.”
Throughout his sophomore 12 months Gallego’s faculty profession was practically derailed after his grades declined and he broke some campus guidelines. (“Underage consuming” was concerned, he instructed the Boston Globe.) Harvard directors kicked him out of faculty, saying he may reapply in a 12 months. A couple of months later, Gallego enlisted as a Marine reservist and accomplished primary coaching in South Carolina. He was readmitted to Harvard for the winter 2001 semester.
That fall, Gallego watched on a laptop computer display screen as two hijacked planes hit the World Commerce Heart towers, altering the nation’s future—and his.
In 2003, throughout what would have been Gallego’s last semester at Harvard, his unit was despatched to Okinawa, Japan, for an uneventful deployment. However the subsequent one wouldn’t be. After graduating from Harvard in 2004, Gallego adopted his faculty girlfriend, Kate Widland, to New Mexico. He did fieldwork for John Kerry’s presidential bid till he was known as up once more, this time to Iraq with a battalion that will ship residence 48 flag-draped caskets, greater than every other since 1983’s Beirut bombing.
After six bloody months in Iraq, Gallego settled in Phoenix, the place Kate had moved to work in Democratic politics. “Coming again to ‘regular’ life was disorienting. The objectives had been nebulous, the relationships far much less intense, and due to this fact much less significant,” he writes in his 2021 memoir, They Referred to as Us “Fortunate.”
Not lengthy after his homecoming, Gallego landed a job at a public relations agency, and work turned a soothing distraction. “I used to be instantly impressed, particularly after I heard his story,” says Joe Yuhas, the agency’s managing associate who remembers assembly Gallego whereas in line for the bar at a charity occasion. “He’s energetic and tenacious and he listens. These had been necessary options within the work that we did.”
Certainly one of Gallego’s first initiatives was battling a state poll proposition banning homosexual marriage. Throughout this marketing campaign, Gallego clashed with one of many native politicians main it, then–state Rep. Sinema.
Gallego’s function included recruiting volunteers, a lot of them members of the identical LGBTQ group as Sinema, who’s bisexual. Even so, she thought of it a mistake to position queer folks on the heart of the marketing campaign—she needed to give attention to how the proposition would additionally make it tougher for straight and single {couples} to entry insurance coverage and authorized protections. After Gallego argued she was alienating their handiest advocates, Sinema ultimately requested his elimination from the marketing campaign. Yuhas chalks it as much as a “character battle,” including that “neither one in all them lacks in character.”
Sinema’s technique was crucial—they received by a 4-point margin—given the state’s conservative politics on the time, Yuhas says. And he notes that Gallego thrived engaged on different initiatives, together with the profitable marketing campaign of Phoenix Metropolis Council Member Michael Nowakowski, who poached Gallego as his chief of employees.
Nowakowski and Gallego had an odd-couple relationship—Nowakowski a soft-spoken supervisor of a Spanish-language radio station who as soon as dreamed of changing into a priest, and Gallego a hard-charging warfare veteran. “I wish to throw down some hail and brimstone, and this man’s like, ‘It’s not how I function,’” Gallego instructed the Arizona Republic in 2008.
Gallego’s fiery temperament precipitated an area scandal the next 12 months when he sharply upbraided a council intern, “yelling and pounding his desk,” in keeping with the Republic. Lower than an hour after the incident, Gallego emailed two metropolis council staffers: “When you might have an opportunity I wish to speak to you about [the aide],” he wrote. “Her time as an intern is up.”
The intern claimed Gallego “was aggressive in direction of me” and filed two complaints with town. She was let go shortly after. Town in the end cleared Gallego of the harassment accusations and famous that the intern was beforehand slated to be dismissed attributable to funds cuts. Gallego touches on the episode in his memoir, attributing his conduct to trauma from his army service. “I’d by no means misplaced my cool earlier than the warfare,” he writes. “Now I did, snapping and yelling at folks for little purpose.”
Gallego resigned from Nowakowski’s workplace in late 2009 to run for a state Home seat representing a liberal portion of Phoenix. On this new function, he prioritized laws that benefited fellow army service members, particularly a bipartisan invoice granting veterans in-state tuition in Arizona. However quickly he was searching for his subsequent break, and after the US Home member who represented his district introduced his retirement, Gallego jumped into the race. After a aggressive major, Gallego handily received the final election.
Gallego’s demons persevered as he climbed the political ladder in DC. “I nonetheless drank greater than I ought to. Smoked greater than I ought to. Misplaced my mood greater than I ought to,” he writes in his e book. “I had nightmares. I thought of my lifeless buddies. I questioned why I used to be alive. I couldn’t appear to seek out something to cheer me up.”
The Division of Veterans Affairs lists many of those signs in its standards for PTSD, a analysis Gallego obtained after three years of medical evaluations. But by then, his relationship with Kate, whom he married in 2010, had unraveled; they introduced their separation in 2016 when she was within the third trimester of her being pregnant with their son. Now the mayor of Phoenix, she and Gallego co-parent their 7-year-old, who usually joins his dad on the marketing campaign path. Kate additionally endorsed her ex-husband’s Senate bid in December, although Gallego’s critics have seized on the timing of their cut up. (Kate Gallego declined an interview with Mom Jones.) The Washington Free Beacon has filed a movement to unseal Gallego’s divorce data, and Lake has attacked him over the difficulty. Referring to Gallego’s pro-choice views, she stated she would “not be lectured on motherhood” by somebody who “left his spouse when she was 9 months pregnant.”
Gallego’s psychological well being struggles have additionally bled into his congressional life. A former Arizona state lawmaker describes a gathering, not lengthy after Gallego first got here to Capitol Hill, by which a veteran who had been injured by an IED lobbied Gallego to oppose the Iran nuclear deal. “When this man got here in and instructed Ruben, ‘In the event you don’t vote in opposition to the invoice, you’re gonna have the blood of American servicemen and ladies in your arms,’ [Gallego] blew up and he began screaming,” the previous lawmaker, who was current, remembers. (A congressional aide who was additionally within the room disputes that Gallego yelled.) “He took a stern tone,” says the aide, who provides Gallego’s frustration was in response to “how aggressive and confrontational the veteran was.”
Gallego’s sometimes-salty disposition, the previous lawmaker factors out, may distinction sharply with the camera-ready persona of his opponent, particularly in the event that they sq. off in a debate. “Lake has had 30 years of tv expertise and might be very poised,” the previous lawmaker says. “And he may come off as an offended brief man yelling on the lady who could be saying outrageous and insane issues however is wanting composed.”
With Lake, political disinformation and deceit are masked by an ideal pixie minimize and gleaming white smile. With Gallego, his allies say, what you see is what you get. “Typically I’m out with him, and he’ll meet anyone new. And I count on politician Ruben to come back out. And it doesn’t,” says Swalwell. “I’ve seen folks inform him they’re in Washington engaged on no matter situation. And he’ll say, ‘Nicely, that’s a foul concept.’ He’s not afraid to inform folks how he feels—not in a impolite method. However in the event you’re anticipating a refined politician, that’s not Ruben, and that’s refreshing.”
In mid-December, Gallego’s forthright nature is on show throughout a go to to Yuma County to guage Somerton’s sixteenth annual Tamale Pageant.
“Good spice,” he writes on a blue scorecard subsequent to a four-star entry.
Entry quantity 24 is “too dry,” however the tamale from contestant 25 is “superb.”
“I don’t find out about this, y’all,” Gallego says as he bites right into a spinach one. “No, no, no, no.” He shakes his head as he pushes the inexperienced mush to the aspect of his plate.
He jokes that after sampling two dozen contenders, he might need to cross the border to pattern one thing else: Ozempic.
As we stroll by numerous meals distributors, Gallego is approached by not less than a dozen pageant attendees, together with a squad of younger cheerleaders in search of a bunch image and a lady from the Cocopah Indian Tribe, who has Gallego’s ear on and off all through the day. “You’ll by no means see Sinema or Kari Lake doing any of this, like speaking to folks, attempting to truly perceive what’s happening with their lives,” he says.
Along with festivals, parades, and rallies—the meat-and-potatoes marketing campaign schedule for any typical candidate—Gallego can be on a mission to go to all 22 federally acknowledged Native tribes in Arizona. A part of that is private. Gallego says two of his closest buddies are Navajo brothers with whom he served in Iraq. And one of many few payments he’s efficiently navigated to passage within the Home supplies sources to Native tribes to assist them stop and examine youngster abuse. Gallego’s technique can be politically astute. The large turnout of Native folks, who make up roughly 5 % of the state inhabitants, proved crucial for Democrats in 2020, when Biden received the state by fewer than 12,000 votes.
Whereas Lake already boasts nationwide title recognition, specialists say Gallego’s go-everywhere-talk-to-everyone method is crucial to broadening his enchantment outdoors of Phoenix. “If the Republicans or Democrats had been successful by an enormous landslide, then possibly it’s not essentially going to make a lot of a distinction to attempt to interact with all these low-population counties,” says Samara Klar, a political science professor on the College of Arizona and an skilled on unbiased voters. “However that’s not the best way in Arizona. We’ve got extraordinarily razor-thin margins of victory.”
The skinny margins have one thing to do with the distinctive politics of Arizona, the place a 3rd of registered voters declare no political occasion. One of many state’s most revered politicians was the late John McCain, the Republican elder statesman of the Senate often called a partisanship-bucking maverick. A 12 months earlier than his demise, McCain famously gave a forceful thumbs-down as he forged the deciding vote in opposition to a GOP-led try and repeal a part of the Inexpensive Care Act. Sinema, who was elected to the Senate shortly after McCain’s demise, additionally rejected a pivotal measure with the identical hand gesture. In her case, she was one in all a handful of Democrats blocking a rise of the federal minimal wage.
Sinema’s obstructionism, particularly her refusal in 2022 to help reforming the filibuster to move the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Development Act by a easy majority, satisfied Gallego to run for her seat. “The filibuster isn’t a software to encourage subtle debate, it’s a software to kill laws that the overwhelming majority of People help,” Gallego said at the time. Later that 12 months, Sinema turned an unbiased and filed preliminary paperwork to run for reelection as such. Gallego’s announcement that he would problem Sinema from the left each elated and alarmed liberals who nervous they’d divide the moderate-to-liberal vote and tip the scales towards a Lake victory—and maybe a GOP-led Senate.
Sinema’s March announcement that she would as an alternative retire on the finish of her time period relieved Democrats, taking a messy three-way race off the desk. Arizona Democrats received massive in 2022, electing a Democratic governor, secretary of state, and lawyer basic. But when the outcomes counsel a repudiation of Trumpism, mounting issues over immigration may hamper Gallego’s possibilities. An October survey of registered Arizona voters, for instance, discovered they trusted Trump greater than Biden on immigration by a margin of 54 to 41 %.
The difficulty is private to Gallego. His mother and father immigrated by way of household reunification and employee visas, he says. He helps rising funding for each humanitarian help and Border Patrol personnel. However he additionally argues that in the present day’s disaster stems largely from the dismantling of the pathways his mother and father took to enter the nation legally.
It’s not merely that migrants want us, he argues, however that we want them. Simply 12 miles from Somerton is the Mexican border, which tens of 1000’s of migrants cross throughout peak season to work the Yuma County fields that produce about 90 % of the nation’s lettuce each winter. Throngs extra go for much less secure and fewer authorized—however extra everlasting—options.
They’re “doing all these unlawful or abusive issues as a result of they wish to get right here and we’re not making it simpler,” he says, “and we do want folks to come back work.”
Two months after the tamale pageant, I meet up with Gallego on Capitol Hill. Whereas he waits to vote on some procedural measures, we take brisk laps between the doorway to the Home chamber and Statuary Corridor. Lately, that is how Gallego will get in his steps, as he juggles legislative and child-rearing duties. Final summer season, Gallego and his second spouse, Sydney, a Democratic lobbyist whom he met on the 2018 annual congressional baseball recreation, welcomed a child woman. A member of the Congressional Dads Caucus, Gallego took just a few weeks of parental depart over the summer season.
On our stroll, we discuss tv reveals (he’s hooked on Netflix’s Griselda), Mexican meals (don’t make him decide a favourite dish), and which chores he contributes to his family. (“The true reply is I don’t do sufficient,” he admits.)
We additionally focus on the day’s legislative agenda—specifically, what wasn’t on it. Earlier that week, Democrats and Republicans appeared near consensus on a border invoice. The deal, initially backed by Senate Minority Chief Mitch McConnell, would have barred migrants with felony histories from making use of for asylum, quickened listening to timelines, and extra. Then Trump weighed in. “Solely a idiot, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Invoice,” he posted to Fact Social. “Don’t be STUPID!!!”
That was that. The invoice was lifeless.
Republicans “actually had nothing else to run on, and it was going to be taken away, and that’s when Donald Trump and his minions known as it in and sunk it,” says Gallego. “It was probably the most cynical political strikes I’ve seen since I’ve been in Washington, DC.”
There’s some competitors for that distinction after all—notably Trump’s effort to overturn the election, which culminated within the riot that despatched Gallego into fight mode three years earlier not removed from the place we stand. That Gallego is now dealing with Lake, one of many greatest promoters of the Huge Lie, on this pivotal Senate race is oddly becoming, and its consequence will say a lot about the place the nation could also be headed.
One candidate amplified the election lies that motivated 1000’s of Trump zealots to ransack the citadel of American democracy. The opposite ready to repel this onslaught—and protect the sanctity of the democratic course of—with a ballpoint pen. In November, democracy is once more on the road. And Gallego is up for the combat.