No, U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego is not a turncoat.
He has not betrayed his Democratic voters.
He has not cast off his liberal values.
Democrats are now the party of rich donors
There are two kinds of Democrats walking through the wreckage of the 2024 presidential election.
There are the sleepwalkers who continue to follow the trail “Status Quo.”
And there are the fully alert.
Gallego represents those who opened their eyes and realized that Democrats have become the party of six figures.
Americans with six-figure incomes, $100,000 or above, now overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party.
Those below $100,000 — the working people who lack high-paying jobs and college diplomas — voted Republican, according to Associated Press Votecast.
Ruben Gallego represents the working class
That means a lot of blue-collar people who used to vote Democrat have abandoned the party.
It includes Latino men, who, according to NBC exit polls, voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 12 percentage points — 55% to 43%.
That’s a 19% increase over the 2020 election.
Even Latino women, who went for Harris by 22 percentage points, moved 8 points in Trump’s direction since 2020.
“I’m bringing the perspective of working class Latinos from Arizona,” Gallego told Politico in an article published on Tuesday. “And that perspective, I think, has been missing.”
Gallego demonstrates his commitment to working class values by supporting the Laken Riley Act, which would require Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take custody of undocumented immigrants charged, arrested or convicted of committing acts of “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.”
He joins 11 other Democrats, including Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, who voted for the bill named for Laken Riley, an Augusta University nursing student who was murdered while jogging at the University of Georgia.
The man convicted was a 26-year-old Venezuelan who had entered the United States illegally.
Democrats misread the room on immigration
Democrats made a mistake hewing too closely to the politics of their special-interest elites, their donor class that funds campaigns, Nina Turner, a former member of the Democratic National Committee, said.
“The Democratic Party has … a problem with a class of people, from elected officials to consultants, who care more about their careers than actually delivering for people.”
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders put it this way: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
That betrayal was particularly acute on the issue of immigration — a generational mistake, Rogé Karma wrote in the politically left Atlantic magazine.
Left-wing immigration nonprofits within the Democratic coalition persuaded party leadership that they would win greater Latino support if they moved left on immigration, he explained.
And so, in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign began to emphasize immigration and diversity, Karma wrote.
Some Democrats are realizing their mistake
In 2020, the party promoted the near decriminalization of the border. Then, in the Biden years, the party tolerated record flows of illegal immigration.
“The Democratic Party’s embrace of these groups was based on a mistake that in hindsight appears simple: conflating the views of the highly educated, progressive Latinos who run and staff these organizations, and who care passionately about immigration-policy reform, with the views of Latino voters, who overwhelmingly do not.
“Avoiding that mistake might very well have made the difference in 2016 and 2024. It could therefore rank among the costliest blunders the Democratic Party has ever made.”
There are plenty of Democrats waking up with this same perspective.
Opinion: Gallego is right. A little prejudice wins elections
New York U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres tweeted soon after the election, “Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx.’”
“There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world. The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.”
Gallego is saving the party from itself
“It’s not rocket science,” said Michigan Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin, who joins Gallego in support of the Laken Riley Act. It’s “talking about … issues plainly, not from the faculty lounge, but from the assembly line.”
She added, “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo. People need to be looked at as independent Americans, whatever group they’re from, whatever party they may be from.”
Antonio Delgado, Democratic lieutenant governor of New York, wrote in a New York Times op-ed soon after the election that his party has “engendered disdain from the very people it sought to serve — everyday, hard-working Americans fed up with being lied to and squeezed out of opportunity.
“The prospect of upsetting the donor class, lobbyists and special interest groups must not prevent us from doing right by our principles. Common sense should rule the day. Yes, we have to secure the border and protect American workers from bad trade deals made in the name of globalization.”
That donor class, those Democrat elites, are angry right now with Ruben Gallego. They believe he is a Benedict Arnold who has withdrawn his support of immigrants.
They could not be more wrong.
Gallego is part of the vanguard of first responders trying to save the Democratic Party from itself.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Sen. Ruben Gallego is no turncoat on immigration | Opinion
