Several Arizonans have stared into that looking glass. It enticed Barry Goldwater and twice gripped John McCain. Last summer, it briefly captured Sen. Mark Kelly, whose name was being floated as a potential replacement for Joe Biden.
Now, another Arizona senator may be making goo-goo eyes at himself. Though Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego has been on the job for only four months, he’s certainly acting like he believes he’s the fairest one of all.
Recently, Arizona’s junior senator has been doing a lot of things usually done by people mulling a run for the White House. Over the weekend, the 45-year-old spoke at a town hall in a Pennsylvania county that went for Trump in 2024. It was ostensibly part of a Democratic Party effort to gear up for the midterms by calling attention to Trump’s harmful policies in vulnerable districts, though it also felt like a presidential trial balloon.
On Monday, Gallego introduced a 21-page immigration plan that calls for strengthening border security, reforming the asylum system, creating additional pathways for citizenship, beefing up technology at the border and more. As potential legislation, it’s probably dead on arrival — Congress hasn’t passed meaningful immigration reform in nearly four decades, and Trump is unlikely to consider a proposal from a Democrat. Instead, it certainly reads like Gallego planting a flag for the 2028 primary.
After comfortably winning his election in a state Trump won by five points, Gallego has cast himself as one of the few Democrats who knows how to win over red voters. He has dropped the progressive firebrand act from his days in the House of Representatives and gone for a more Kyrsten Sinema-style pragmatism, which is all the more ironic given he attacked Sinema from the left and essentially booted her from the Senate.
He’s angered progressives in Arizona with his stances — particularly by voting to confirm many Trump cabinet nominees and co-sponsoring the Laken Riley Act — and, in turn, has lectured them for being too puritanical.
Gallego has pointedly criticized his party’s approach in a series of interviews with national publications, which seem to be beating down his door to hear his sage wisdom. When asked about his cozy relationship with a crypto investor at the Pennsylvania event, he said Democrats need to expand the tent to win elections. In a Fox News interview about his border plan, he said Democrats have too long neglected the border security portion of immigration reform.
But if much of this is 2028 posturing — or, at least, doubling as that alongside the more pressing duties of governing under a Trump presidency — it raises a question: How seriously should we take Ruben Gallego, presidential contender? After all, the candidate he beat for his Senate seat was Kari Lake, one of the most unlikeable and unsuccessful major candidates in Arizona history.
Does Gallego really hold the keys to Democrats winning elections in a MAGA-dominated world? Or did he just get lucky?
That Kari Lake was such a bad candidate certainly helped Ruben Gallego win a Senate seat. But Arizona politicos say he deserves a large amount of credit.
Screenshot via YouTube
A serious candidate?
Spokespeople for Gallego declined to comment on the record for this article, though Gallego has already addressed the 2028 speculation. Speaking to the Washington Post on Thursday, Gallego said he was not thinking about a presidential run “right now.” But he also told reporters that the old adage is true.“Has it ever crossed my mind?” he said. “Fucking of course, I’m an elected official, it crosses my mind.”
If Gallego is serious about a run, two Arizona political consultants think he should be taken, well, seriously.
Yes, Lake was a bad candidate. The TV newscaster-turned-MAGA-cheerleader was undeniably unlikable and her campaign’s extreme messaging “was not viewed as credible” by many voters, said HighGround CEO and President Chuck Coughlin, a centrist Republican politico. As MAGA candidate after MAGA candidate has proved in Arizona, Trump can win statewide elections here, but Trump-lite cannot.
“Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” Coughlin said. “Everybody else is a unicorn in a clown suit.”
So, does Gallego’s win get an asterisk? Was this Logan Paul beating a 58-year-old Mike Tyson and acting like he’s the heavyweight champion of the world?
No, the consultants say. Lake’s unlikability might make it easy to write off Gallego’s win against her. But Democratic consultant Jeremy Helfgot, the principal of JM Helfgot Communications, said that would be a “reductive,” “dismissive” and a mistake.
“I don’t think it was an easy race by any means,” said Helfgot, who first met Gallego in 2006 while Helfgot was working on the Senate campaign for Democrat James Pederson. “He really did keep it above board despite her attempts to pull things down into the mud repeatedly.”
Coughlin points to the margin and context of Gallego’s victory. Trump beat Harris by 5.6 percentage points in Arizona. Republicans hold a major registration advantage in Arizona, and Republican turnout dwarfed Democratic turnout by nine percentage points in November. Despite that, Gallego still beat Lake by 2.5 points — a margin of victory that was 7.2 points better than expected, according to Split Ticket.
To Coughlin, that’s a margin of victory that Democrats should heed.
“For him to win in a nine-plus GOP cycle, I’d be listening to what the man says,” he said. “There were unquestionably Trump-Gallego voters. That’s a good thing for Ruben to talk about.”
Still, a Gallego candidacy might face some opposition from the left. Grassroots groups in Arizona distrust him, and the progressive/populist tandem of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has demonstrated an ability to generate excitement. For what it’s worth, the Democratic Party has never really tried running a true progressive, always defaulting to a more centrist candidate.
At any rate, it’s too early for all of this, Helfgot and Coughlin agree.
“I don’t think right now that this is a presidential run” for Gallego, Helfgot said. “At this point, I think this is a fight for the literal survival of American democracy.” For Helfgot, that means continuing “to fiercely oppose” the “illegal, unconstitutional, immoral and unethical policies that are coming out of the White House.”
That’s a more immediate battle than the fight to succeed Trump in the White House. Then again, one thing can lead to another. Coughlin thinks Gallego has an opportunity to orient Democratic messaging toward the middle of the political spectrum, using his won-in-a-Trump-state bona fides to do so.
Then, years from now, Coughlin said, Gallego could “lead the Democratic Party to the promised land.”
