Understanding the Border — and How We Win

Dan Koh: For many Americans, it feels like Democrats don't know how to win anymore. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona knows how to win. He was elected to the Senate in 2024, the same year Donald Trump got reelected to the presidency, and outperformed the Democratic national ticket by eight points. Senator Gallego joins us to explain what Democrats can learn from his victory, his perspective on the US-Mexico border, and how his time in the Marines shapes his time in Washington. Let's swear into the People's Cabinet Senator Ruben Gallego. 

Dan Koh: Senator Ruben Gallego, welcome to the People's Cabinet.

Senator Ruben Gallego: Thank you for having me. 

Dan Koh: Despite Donald Trump's approval rating being the lowest of any modern-day president after 100 days, the only group that seems to have a worse approval rating are Democrats, some ratings as low as 27%. 

Senator Ruben Gallego: You’re basically down to family and friends. 

Dan Koh You were elected senator and you outpaced the Democratic ticket by eight points. So my question to you first is, lead us out of the wilderness on your side. How do we make it out of this? 

Senator Ruben Gallego: Man, I would be a very powerful man if I could just snap my fingers and do that. This is very simple. I think Democrats need to understand that we can't be out of the norm of where the normal voter is. And what does that mean? It means a lot of things, but the most important thing is listen to what's going on. Listen to the voters. And there's some things you're going to hear that would have given you a clue what was happening. In Arizona, it is a very swing state. And what we heard were voters that were unhappy about the cost of living and the border, and they were consistently saying it over and over again. And I think a lot of politicians were trying to be Pollyannish about what they were hearing instead of actually hearing it and trying to convince them like, "Oh yeah, no, I'm good on this stuff, I'm going to fix it," or "Hey, you're right, we messed up, here's how we're going to fix it." At the end of the day, voters get to vote. And if you don't give them at least enough of what they want, they're going to go look for something else. And that's a weird thing, like I was talking to voters, like, "Well, you know, Donald Trump is crazy, but I'd rather have crazy." That's what people said. And I hope that we take lessons from this. In order to win elections, we have to be popular. That's a real thing. You'd be surprised how many people don't want to understand that.

Dan Koh: And how much of the blame do you place on the party not having a more effective message, and how much do you credit, right or wrong, both leading up to and after the campaign, the Democrats not articulating their message enough on kitchen table issues, etc., versus the Republicans effectively framing?

Senator Ruben Gallego: Look, if you look at the Republicans, they barely won, let's be clear. They won a pretty good amount in popular votes, and it wasn't that surprising, but they barely went through the Electoral College. I think what happened was the Democrats did not want to do self-introspection and then have a campaign around that because if we had actually been honest with ourselves and actually listened to the voters, we would have had to admit that all of our efforts had not actually helped the working class as much as we hoped it had. We did pass good bills. We did pass consequential bills. But if you actually talk to that base voter, they were just not feeling it. We would have to admit that maybe the stuff we did with the IRA just didn't reach them. I'm not saying the IRA is bad, but it just didn't reach them. Maybe we have to address that lowering the cost of food, gasoline, whatever it was, was something we intended to do, but we just weren't doing it. And it wasn't communicated. It was a lot of things that we needed to admit to ourselves, and I think we weren't willing to admit. And by doing that, we ended up running a campaign that was just out of step for where the voter was.

Dan Koh: How were you orienting your message in Arizona itself, and the eight-point difference? Were you surprised by that, or were you not surprised that there were a lot of Gallego-Trump voters?

Senator Ruben Gallego: We were not surprised. A lot of Gallego-Trump voters. Why? Because we heard it out there. The other thing is that people failed to understand is that a Trump voter is not a Trump voter. A lot of them were Gallego voters who decided to vote for Donald Trump. It's not me hyping myself up or anything like that. This is just a swing voter that connected with us but just could not connect with the Harris campaign. We also had a Green Party candidate who took 2.5% of our vote. So I thought my margins would be higher. I thought the vice president would do better in Arizona. Towards the end, I felt that she was not going to win it, but that it would be closer. The Gallego-Trump voter is largely apolitical. They don't watch TV shows or read the news. They don't actually follow politics. And we designed an early campaign for that voter, not thinking that they're going to go Trump voters, but we knew that they were these people that were worried about the economy, worried about the border. But they're not doing research. They're not going to Google my name and vote on it. They're going to be largely listening to other people or just in general the vibes of what the hell is going on in the campaign or the election season. And so we tried to essentially run a campaign that was obviously going to the educated voter and also at the same time run the campaign that can break through into the people that just vote on pure vibes.

Dan Koh: You dropped an F-bomb in the first sentence or two of this interview. But you are known to be someone who just speaks like a normal person. So I want to probe that a little bit because I think there's a lot of Democrats, especially in Washington, who are so buttoned up on their image, they're afraid to talk like you talk. You tweeted about J.D. Vance, "No class," when he was talking about President Biden's cancer diagnosis. Can you talk about authenticity in the Democratic Party and how you felt like you were able to connect with voters in ways that maybe it's not commonplace here?

Senator Ruben Gallego: Because I'm not on all the time. It's easier for me not to be on all the time. I don't want to pretend to be somebody else when I'm out there. I'm also fairly accessible. When I go home, I go to my local restaurants, and I live in a very working-class area. I go to my local grocery store. I don't want to be on all the time. It's fucking tiring. Why would you want to do that? And so it's easier for me just to be who I am and bring politics to that versus the other way around. I think a lot of my colleagues have been trained to be on for so long that now they just don't know how to be themselves in a while, won't conduct themselves in politics. Politics has changed a lot. I think that's very off-putting to people and to voters in general.

Dan Koh: A demographic that you've talked a lot about are dudes, and that demographic in a large quantity shifted to Trump in the presidential election. Can you talk a little bit about your experiences of how you communicated with that group, and you said things like, "We shouldn't treat addressing and speaking directly to men as exclusionary of women"?

Senator Ruben Gallego: Look, I think the Democratic Party moved away from this big tent mentality, which was one of the reasons why we won, and have started getting narrower and narrower. We haven't won the male vote in quite a while, actually, to be clear. But now we're also starting to lose other demographics that we were winning. The white male vote has been eluding us for a while. We started losing the black male vote, the Latino vote, the young male vote, which we used to get, actually went for Republicans. You'll hear margins like, "It's because we're not cool." I'm not sure politics has ever been cool. I'm not sure politicians have ever been cool. I think they're not seeing anything from us. The male demographic is not doing great if you just look at the dataset of this group and take sex out of it. They have lower graduation rates, lower college graduation rates. They're buying fewer homes, higher rates of suicide, higher rates of drug abuse. All these things, if you saw and described it to a community, it's okay to care about us as policymakers. We should do something about this. But for some reason, whenever it's involving males, we're like, "Right." And I think at some point, they're voters. They get to vote. Why don't we actually try to figure out what to do, not just because we want their vote, but because they're also Americans? We need to figure out what's going on here. What can we do to keep men, and this goes for black men, Latino men, this is something that's cross-cultural, white men, what can we do to reduce their suicide rate? What can we do to make sure that they are able to go to college, graduate college, or some kind of program so they could actually get good jobs? Because guess what? We're better off as a country if the other 50% of our country has good-paying jobs, has good college attainment, feels that they could go out and find a mate, get a house. These are the things that we don't really think about because we're not supposed to think about men as a protected class. But we should at least think of them as Americans. And it's kind of taboo within Democratic politics for some reason to think about men. And I think that's weird too.

Dan Koh: Related to that, you've talked in the past about different aspirations around men and aspirations around wealth. You said people want to get rich, they want their kids to get rich, whether it's men or women. Can you talk about that?

Senator Ruben Gallego: I just think we don't really talk to people's aspirations anymore. Especially for me, the son of immigrants, this is why my family came to this country, so they can be successful and be rich. And I was trying to talk to my colleagues about this. They're like, "Oh, so we shouldn't attack en masse." No, no, no, here's how this works. People want to be rich, but they want it to be fair. If Elon Musk is kind of screwing the system up, they're not going to give him forgiveness because he's rich. But we have to be the party that is going to say, "Yeah, you may be starting at the bottom rung of life, but we're going to make sure that you have the opportunity to succeed, to be rich, to buy a house." We really can't be ashamed of being the party of upward mobility, which we have been forever. This is why we emphasize public schools, doing a lot of programs, public programs to help people out of poverty. But we never say what the reason is. The reason is because we want you to have a chance to be wealthy, to be secure. It went from that to we just became the party of equity, which is great, but what's the goal of equity? What's the overall outcome of that? Why do I want to provide food stamps? Of course, I want people not to go hungry. But also because I want you to have a chance to study, not worry about food, to take care of your children, all these things that we just aren't connecting the last node to, I guess, is the way I put it.

Dan Koh: Another area that I think Democrats are still trying to figure out is the border. You've been very thoughtful about this, obviously coming from a border state. In this podcast, we try not to assume that people have done the deep research on certain things. So I'd love for you to explain what the crux of the controversy is and then what you've proposed.

Senator Ruben Gallego: One of the first things I recognized as a Democrat, as a border state Democrat, is how many Democrats did not actually understand the border. The other thing is there's a lot of Republicans that also don't understand the border, and there's a lot of really conservative Republicans from other states that demonize the border. And then there's also a lot of Democrats from liberal-leaning states that make it seem that there's no problem with the border. Towards the end of our campaign, when they asked people that voted in 2020 who they trusted more on the border, it was me or Kari Lake. We won that. I was the only Senate candidate in the whole country to beat a Republican in terms of trusting the border. And the reason we did that is because we had a very realistic, Arizona-centric border perspective that we talked to our constituents about, versus my opponent, who clearly seemed like her perspective of the border was coming from East Coast political consultants. She showed up at the border with a handgun next to the border wall. Look, in Arizona, that's no better. Why do you have a handgun next to the border wall when you're already there with security? We send our kids down to Rocky Point, which is the nearest beach to Arizona. It's in Mexico. That's not what's happening. Are there problems at the border? Sure, yes. What we saw were what the administration did with the millions of people allowed to cross and ask for asylum was terrific. It's very complicated. I'd rather have you explain it than somebody from me.

Dan Koh: Can you tell, just again, I think there's a lot of conversation about the border from people who have no tangible constituents or stories about it. It would be really important for our listeners to hear stories that you hear from your constituents, especially in the border towns, both on why we need border control but also the humanity around what the Trump administration is doing.

Senator Ruben Gallego: Essentially, under Trump one, it kind of became known within the world's population of people that want to come here that if you come to the United States and ask for asylum, you will get a hearing, and you could just go to the border and do that. It just started getting bigger and bigger, and people started figuring that out. The infrastructure for asylum hearings fell behind even further and further. It went from one to two years to five years. In that time period, you get your first asylum hearing, you get a work permit. Asylum is essentially saying that you feel like you're going to face persecution in your home country for religious reasons, political violence, not economic reasons or violence of some sort. Because we have that standard by law, they come to the border. There is no asylum judge at the border, so they just basically get a hearing at some point. That hearing kept on growing and growing. The word got out across the world, starting with Trump one and then going into Biden, because essentially Trump used COVID under Title 42 to shut down anyone going to the border and asking for asylum. So they actually did stop it, but what it did is it just created a lot of people waiting at the border. President Biden came in and lifted Title 42. One of the things that a lot of us warned from border states, because we saw what was waiting on the other side, was do not lift Title 42 without a plan to deal with this, because you're just going to have people rushing the border. And so he lifted Title 42, and that basically started the process where millions of people started coming to the border and asking for asylum. The administration responded in law by saying, "Well, here's your asylum slip." And that just kept on growing. It came to the point where, for example, in Arizona, we had men flying from Senegal to Europe, Europe to Brazil, Brazil to Cancun, Cancun to Tijuana, using actual travel agents, not U.S.-based travel agents, to do all of this. In Tijuana, they would organize themselves with other Senegalese, negotiate with a coyote. It's a whole industry around it. They would go into the border spots where they knew they were handing out even longer work permits. These men would sell everything in Senegal, cars, take out loans, because they know they get here and they get into that process, they'll be here for five, seven years. So taking out a $10,000 loan when you get to work for five, seven years is a good economic trade-off. It got to the point where Mexican airlines started adding routes between southern Mexico and northern Mexico. This got bad. It got really, really, really bad. The president should not have lifted Title 42 without a plan, but it got worse. A lot of us were telling him, "You need to do something." There are temporary ways to do this, like empowering asylum judges, hiring more judges, everything else like that. And it just didn't happen. For the longest time, the vision of hundreds of thousands of people rushing the borders and then seeing the effect of it and then seeing it spilling over into our cities, that eventually erodes people's trust. The president eventually did make the right decision, but it was far too late. What's happening at the border right now under Trump is what the border communities wanted. They wanted fewer people coming to the border and asking for asylum because those border communities are largely very large companies. They make their money off border trade. Their businesses, their factories, their tourism. When these asylum seekers came through, what happened is a lot of the border security as well as the Customs Border Police basically shut down their efforts for normal trade and migration to handle the asylum cases and process them. And so businesses were going closed, leaving these small towns, and their entire reliance on this business coming in. They were also draining the system. What usually would happen is Border Patrol or customs would process these men and women and then they would just release them. Imagine if you're a town like San Luis, a town of about 6,000 on the border. Border Patrol gets a couple of thousand people, they process them, and then they just release them into the town. San Luis is probably about 30 minutes away from Yuma. Yuma is the biggest city in the county, and even then, that's not that big of a city. And from there, the biggest city is probably a three-hour drive in Phoenix, Arizona. So imagine you're a small town. Doesn't matter how good-natured you are, you have a lot of strangers now roaming around, and there's no place to put them. They're just creating this chaos. When Biden started towards the end of his administration in June, July, with a crackdown on the border, as in basically giving the power to Border Patrol to deny people asylum on the spot, it started slowing down, and security started coming back to the border. People were able to have more border trade that was more deliberative and predictable, and the street releases, as they're called, were a lot less. Trump comes in and continues that. Now illegal crossings and people coming to that border asking for asylum are almost down to zero. And what that has done is these communities are happy now. They like the border trade that's coming through. They feel they don't see the masses of people around them that they don't know. And in that regard, they're happy. Now what's happening across the country, and even to some degree in these areas, the mass deportations, they don't like because that's not what they felt they voted for. They don't like the fact that people that were protected are now arbitrarily said they're not protected. Workers with work permits, people with visas, green cards, things of that nature. And they're not happy that even people that are here illegally but have no major criminal records are being deported because they think that they should be able to stay here. And what the president is doing is really becoming unpopular with a lot of these people because that's the one area where they thought there should be some compromise. My position on all this is the Democrat position should be fairly simple. And because I think it's actually more humane, let's do everything we can to keep illegal border crossings down to zero. Let's figure out a way to make sure people don't want to come to the border and ask for asylum. Tighten up the laws, let them claim asylum through other processes in other countries, hire more border judges, more asylum judges to make decisions faster. But then also, figure out a way to get these people that are here that have community roots, how do we get them to stay here? The way to communities I think that deserve a chance to be citizens is dreamers and the spouses of U.S. citizens. And then on a more likely to happen legislative level, let's give everyone else some type of permanency or a visa that allows them to stay in this country, work, pay taxes, and be able to contribute but not be at the mercy of an administration coming in changing them. And who knows, maybe the future politics changes, they'll have an opportunity to move. But what I'm trying to get at is we are never going to have a country full of no immigrants. And we should figure out how to keep those that are here, legalize them, and then also have a very flexible way to bring in new workers. Some of the stuff is controversial. I have an E-Verify program, and people say, "Oh, you can't do that." I'm like, well, if you have a very good guest worker program and you shut down the border and you legalize everyone that's in this country, whether they get to become citizens or they get to stay here as residents, then the E-Verify is really only going to catch the really bad apples. This is the territory that I think Democrats have to move to. This, by the way, is very reminiscent of what the Democrat position had been under Obama and Clinton. I think that's something that we could point to, like we are for safe communities, a safe border, humane treatment of those that have been living in the shadows here, and then making sure that people get a flexible guest worker permit that meets the manner of the economy.

Dan Koh: Can you talk about the pageantry that's been surrounding all of this? Your proposal seems very pragmatic and practical, but then you were with Secretary Nome. You had to talk about her $50 million jet. You were very famously criticizing her for the way she held her gun in that scene that was completely wrong. She's flown down to El Salvador, standing in front of prisoners at San Quentin. As someone who is talking to constituents every day and understands both what needs to be solved but also the humanity of armed people, family separations, etc., how do you react when you see Secretary Nome doing these things, which are unprofessional?

Senator Ruben Gallego: It's important to be, in the Marines, they teach you to be a quiet professional. You don't have to be loud to be tough. You don't have to be cruel in order to be effective. And the fact is, they're cruel, and they're not effective. At the end of the day, this is why you see these over-the-top shows of force that end up costing a ton of money. They're sending people to Guantanamo, and I think there's only 360 of them or so, and then they brought them back. That alone costs $21 million. All these things that you could do in a smart way to actually go after the bad people that they claim they're going to go after. But I guess cruelty is the point, to really keep their base happy, because at the end of the day, they're not going to be able to accomplish what they want. They won't be able to deport 8 to 10 million, 12 million undocumented people in this country. So instead, they're just going to waste money. I give them credit for giving us security at the border. It's not really sustainable the way they do it, but if they change their ways, there are ways to do it. But now they're pulling off FBI agents, other agents that are investigating child porn, money laundering. They're pulling off ATF agents, FBI agents, and not making other U.S. citizens safer. You're using an FBI agent to go after a taco vendor, or you see 12 agents swarm on a woman in Worcester, Massachusetts. What does it say that you need that many agents to take down one woman who, from what I understand, does not even have a criminal record? It shows a lot. Weakness shouts, and strength whispers. And yeah, Secretary Nome is a shouter for sure.

Dan Koh: You made a reference to your time in the Marines. First and foremost, I found it fascinating about your biography that you enlisted and you were not an officer. Can you split the difference between the officer track and the enlisted track, and then secondly, your decision to do that?

Senator Ruben Gallego: Most people that have college degrees become an officer. I didn't have my college degree yet, so I joined the reserves. I enlisted in the reserves really because I just wanted to serve. I felt like I wanted to at least give something back to this country as a son of immigrants. There's no better country. I would never have succeeded as much as I have if I had been born in Colombia or Mexico. My family does not come from wealth over there. I always felt a very strong pull of patriotism to serve this country. This was in the Clinton era. I guess I could have gone active duty, but I also thought this is a good step, start as a reservist, see if you enjoy it, and then you can move on from there.

Dan Koh: Can you talk about how that background has informed what you're doing now, putting holds on nominees and the cuts you're seeing at the VA?

Senator Ruben Gallego: I joined the infantry because, in the Marines, you might as well do infantry. That's my opinion. Fast forward five years after that, I end up being in a unit that saw a lot of combat. I saw my best friend die, friends die, a lot of friends die, unfortunately. And then we came back just really wounded, broke. The VA was not ready for us. I found myself being kind of an unofficial VA counselor to a bunch of veterans. It's kind of what eventually propelled me into politics. Talking to the men I served with, these guys are like family to me. I text with them almost every day. And this administration comes in saying they're going to cut 83,000 VA employees without any plan. They're not telling us who they're going to cut, how they're going to cut, how this is going to affect veterans and their services. I had problems getting my services in my younger days. I was really worried about that. So I'm on the VA committee, and they want to start coming through with other VA political appointees. I just couldn't stand there and not do anything. I only have a couple of cards to play in the minority, and this is one. I'm asking them to show me their plan. Who is getting cut? What are the 83,000 people they're going to cut? Because the cuts start July 1st, by the way. We're almost a month and two weeks away from these cuts being effective, and they can't tell us who they're cutting, why they're cutting them, what's the plan. Explain to me how this isn't going to affect services, because what we've been trying to get is more people to work for the VA, and the problem has always been that we need more, not less. That's why I'm holding their nominations. If they want those nominations to move forward, then explain to us exactly how this is going to affect veterans.

Dan Koh: Last question for you. This is a time where I think there's a lot of scared people out there, a lot of people who are nervous about what Trump's going to do the next hour, let alone day or week. There are people that I know you've talked about in town halls, and I know you've talked actively to people who have voted for Trump in 2024 and continue to try to bring them into the tent. A lot of the guys that I served with voted for Donald Trump and are regretting it now. What is your advice to people listening who know those people in their communities? What's the one line or message you'd give to them?

Senator Ruben Gallego: Don't be a snob. Don't tell them, "I told you so." It'll make you feel better, maybe, but do we want to win? Do you want to save this democracy? Want to save this country? Then talk to them and talk to them from a perspective of a fellow American, as a friend. I think that's the most important thing. And by the way, they're not going to agree with you on everything about Trump. They're not going to go from, "Man, I really liked him," to, "Now, man, I really hate him," on all this. They're going to probably still like some of the stuff he's doing. And it could be anything, but learn to work with what you got. You'd be surprised. Some of my veterans, my guys, they're really unhappy about the VA. They're really unhappy about the firing of federal workers that are veterans. And they're fine with what's happening at the border and immigration, but we're able to get them to move in our direction. These guys are voting Democratic in 2026 because of what Trump is doing now. Trump's not running again, but that tells you if I came to them like, "See, I told you so," it's not going to get them. And that means our guys, the blue team, won't win in 2026. So focus on winning, bigger tent. That means you have to bring in Trump voters that maybe they're seeing a little on the light. So don't be afraid of letting them in. Don't be afraid of treating them like normal Americans.

Dan Koh: Senator Gallego, thank you for coming on. 

Senator Gallego: Appreciate it. Cigars next time. 

Dan Koh: Absolutely.

Dan Koh: We hope you enjoyed this episode of The People's Cabinet. If you did, please like, subscribe, ring that bell, and put in the comments below who else you'd like to see sworn in. And stay tuned for new episodes every Tuesday. Let's Go.