Ruben Gallego and Zerlina Maxwell: Make Them Own It
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Who is Senator Ruben Gallego and how did he defeat Carrie Lake?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a double dose today. Up in segment two, it's my girl Zerlina Maxwell. But first, she's a U.S. Senator representing Arizona. He was previously a U.S. Congressman. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a Marine infantryman. His name is Senator Ruben Gallego. How you doing, Senator? Hey, good morning. Good to see you. We were talking a bit in the green room about my friend Carrie Lake. You defeated her in the election in 2024. Solidly, yeah. Yeah. Bad news for the voice of America. Maybe good news for the Senate. I wanted to ask you about that, your point about solidly, because there were several Democrats that won elections. in states where Trump won.
But if you look at the data, it was mostly because those people voted for Trump and then went home. They're Trump-only voters. Your state was the one example that was different. You had about 100,000 more votes than Kamala Harris. And so I do think that your case is kind of an interesting one to study. So I'm wondering if you've reflected on that, if you have any theories of the case. Was it something about you, something about Kerry, something about Arizona? Yeah.
What strategies did Ruben Gallego use in his campaign to win Arizona?
It was a combination of a lot of things. Like, look, we ran a very retail-oriented campaign to begin with. We literally were going to baseball games, putting together boxing watch parties, rodeos, reaching out to Latino men, talking to everyone, talking to Republicans, going to rural Arizona. I also think we actually were talking about Arizona and the politics of Arizona, but what was happening there in a realistic manner. We were talking about the cost of everything going up and how we need to fix that. And that is a problem. And I think that was... something that a lot of Arizonans appreciated because I think they were hearing from some campaigns like, no, things are good. I'm like, no, they're not. But we were also very serious about the border. And we talked about the border in a very serious Arizona way, right, where we want more border patrol. We want, you know, bad people to get deported. We want immigration reform. We want to protect DREAMers.
And we want trade to keep continuing because that's really important to our business in Arizona versus someone like Carrie Lake who just – talked about the border, what like an East Coast Republican conservative thinks the border is in Arizona, right? She would say that, you know, the cartels own the border, the Arizona border. Now, I'm sure on the Mexican side, that does happen. But you're telling people, police chiefs in Nogales, in San Luis, US citizens, that they're essentially controlled by cartels when they're trying to bring in business or trying to start their families, everything else like that. And then she would go to the border, go to the border wall as if it was like the Great Wall in Jerusalem. And she put her hands up on the border wall.
While wearing a pistol, while packing a pistol, and put this on a commercial. In Arizona, we literally send our teenage kids to Mexico for spring break, right? We cross that border every day. So when people started seeing Kelly talking about the border while she was wearing a weapon on her hip, no one could understand what she was trying to do. It didn't really match reality. And at the end of the day, that's why... You know, if you look at the exit polling, more people trusted me on the border than they trusted Carrie Lake. That didn't happen anywhere else in the country when it comes to Democrats running for Senate.
That's interesting. The immigration politics of this, there's a buzzy article in the New York Times by David Leonhardt this week where all of the, you know, all the coastal libs are like, whoa, this is interesting. like they're just learning about something you've been working on. And he wrote about Denmark and met Fredrickson, who's kind of the center-left, but pretty left, really.
How does Senator Gallego approach border and immigration issues?
It should be left-left for America, but center-left for Europe, leader in Denmark, and how the key difference between Denmark and these other countries in Europe is that they have... taking the immigration challenge very seriously and reduced immigration levels. I'm wondering what your kind of thoughts are. Are there any lessons from you and from her just broadly?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Senator Ruben Gallego and how did he defeat Carrie Lake?
0:08–1:13
2
What strategies did Ruben Gallego use in his campaign to win Arizona?
1:13–3:38
3
How does Senator Gallego approach border and immigration issues?
3:38–8:47
4
What are the implications of the Republican budget and Medicaid cuts?
8:47–13:06
5
Why is the treatment of veterans under the current administration concerning?
13:06–22:53
6
How should Democrats address media and communication challenges?
22:53–26:34
7
What are the current challenges in regulating cryptocurrency?
26:34–31:30
8
How does Ruben Gallego connect with 'bro culture' and popular trends?
31:30–55:47
Speakers
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