EL PASO, Texas — Before he took the stage, most people in the rally crowd had no idea who he was, and the few who could remember ever hearing his name could recall only vague biographical facts: Didn’t he serve in the military? Wasn’t he raised by his mom?
He was short. They knew that now, because the governor of New Mexico had just made a joke about it. They learned he was a champion for the Democratic Party, a fighter who had beaten a Republican in a red state, a model for the upset they were all here rooting for.
“Help me welcome Senator Gallego!” the governor said.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, took the microphone. He riffed on the governor’s joke about his height, which got a laugh, and launched into a boilerplate rally speech for a couple hundred people at the Epic Railyard Event Center.
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He was here in late October, on a five-stop swing through heavily Latino midterm battlegrounds in Nevada, Texas and Florida, to test the appetite for his politics outside his home state before potentially running for president.
Among political insiders, Gallego’s rising star has dulled in recent months. He was close friends with former Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, who is under federal investigation for sexual misconduct, and Gallego has faced questions about what he knew. Gallego himself was also accused by one House member of campaign finance violations and sexual misconduct; the Senate Ethics committee dismissed the complaint in June.
But Gallego, 46, has reportedly eyed his party’s presidential nomination since shortly after he won his seat in 2024. He’s made trips to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. And like other potential candidates, he has spent recent months courting possible donors.
Days before the midterm elections, though, he was still deflecting questions about running.
“I can’t have a long race,” he told me. “I just don’t think I could be a good father and a good candidate at the same time, and so we’re going to decide what’s best for my family.”
When Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich looked at the potential primary field, he saw hope for the senator, writing in an email: “A lot of these guys are talented, but they have no differentiation and no narrative; Gallego has both of those things.”
Gallego grew up poor. He had an abusive father who left the family. He went to Harvard, where he served drinks at parties held by Pete Buttigieg, and he fought in Iraq, where his best friend was killed. He scaled the political ladder, from the Phoenix City Council to the Senate, and he became one of his party’s best communicators with Latinos and young men — two key groups in the Democrats’ quest to take back the White House.
“Will it be enough to catapult him to the upper echelon of 2028 contenders?” Lehrich wrote. “Hard to say; certainly not overnight. … But I do think he has a lot more upside, and a more realistic path, than many presidential hopefuls.”
During his travels, Gallego said, he’s realized Latino men are angrier and more fearful now than they were in 2022 or 2024. The men feel an existential responsibility to protect and provide for their families, he said, and they’re struggling to do so because of the rising cost of living and the overreach of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The senator, who is known for channeling his anger in frank, often profane speech, acknowledged this moment might feel more natural to him than to other politicians.
Could the blueprint that worked in Arizona in 2024 work in Las Vegas and San Antonio, suburbs and small towns, all across the Sun Belt and all across the nation?
“Wherever I’ve gone with that message, it has resonated very strongly,” Gallego said. “And some people, by time I get there, already have heard my message. That tells me that people are interested.”
* * *
One of Gallego’s biggest problems flared up at the dawn of the tour.
Early last Monday morning, as he prepped for a day of events in Las Vegas, FBI agents raided a mansion in Beverly Hills as part of the agency’s investigation into Swalwell.
Swalwell, who was accused by five women of sexual assault and harrassment, has denied and vowed to fight the allegations. Gallego has said that, while he knew his longtime close friend was “flirty,” he “never saw him engage in any of the predatory behavior.”
Gallego declined to comment on whether he’d ever visited the mansion, as well as on the progress of the investigation.
The mansion is owned by timeshare billionaire Stephen Cloobeck, who let Swalwell live there for a time, and who, according to campaign finance records, donated to Gallego’s senate campaign the maximum allowable amount of $3,300.
When asked about his relationship with Cloobeck, Gallego said, “He was just a donor. He donated to many other campaigns.”
Later that day, in Vegas, Gallego met with a major hospitality workers’ union (also one of the largest immigrant organizations in the early-primary state) and campaigned with the Democratic candidate for governor, Aaron Ford, at a market called El Mercado.
Gallego, pundits say, is an ideal surrogate in Latino communities. Last year, he attended rallies for the eventual governors of Virginia and New Jersey, and he stumped for the eventual first female and first non-Hispanic mayor of Miami. This year, Tejano musician Bobby Pulido, who is running in a Texas district that President Donald Trump won by 18 points in 2024, told Semafor that he didn’t want visits from national Democrats — except Gallego, whom he called a “friend of mine.”
The next day, in Nevada’s deep red 2nd Congressional District, Gallego championed Democratic nominee Teresa Benitez-Thompson. He seemed to disdain her Republican opponent, David Flippo, who is embroiled in a stolen-valor controversy.
“David Flippo has zero character,” Gallego said in a video, an edge in his voice. “As an Iraq war veteran myself, I can’t imagine someone like him being able to go to this office after lying about his Bronze Star citation. He knew he was lying. He kept that lie up.”
In Texas, Gallego started in San Antonio, where he campaigned for Democratic nominee Katy Padilla Stout in the historically red 23rd District, and then he flew to El Paso to campaign for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa.
In the industrial-chic wedding venue, only one of the two dozen rally goers interviewed for this article knew Gallego. Yvonne Gomez, a 64-year-old retiree, was aware of his military service and election integrity efforts. (In June, Gallego co-sponsored a bill to prevent Trump from using military or federal law enforcement to interfere with the midterm elections.) But like all Democrats, she said, Gallego needed to do more than oppose Trump to get her vote.
“I want a plan,” she explained. “I don’t care about retribution. … We’ve got bigger issues.”
Billy Estrada, a 21-year-old political science student at the University of Texas-El Paso, said he didn’t know who Gallego was and that he shouldn’t run for president. He preferred Democrats to nominate Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom or New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“You should select someone to represent your party that’s well-known,” he said. “If you’re going to go against a mascot name [like Trump], [your candidate] should be a mascot name, too.”
After Gallego began speaking, the people who had chairs, who were on their third speech of the night, all sat down. And as he spoke, the crowd was enthusiastic but not raucous. They booed mentions of Trump, Elon Musk and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. They cheered his version of the party’s messages on corruption and affordability. And when Gallego mentioned the pain of taking trucks to the gas pump, a man in the back said, “Yep!”
Gallego never mentioned the finer points of the sweeping economic agenda he unveiled last month. But he mentioned again and again part of its title: “the American Dream.” In 2024, he significantly outperformed Harris by winning groups that otherwise embraced Trump, such as Latinos, young men and the working class, especially those without college degrees. A big part of his success, he has said, was talking about restoring the American Dream.
Research from a Democratic nonprofit called Winning Jobs Narrative consistently finds voters don’t just want prices to come down, according to Executive Director Steve Pierce. People want to build good lives by doing things like buying a home, saving some money for retirement and enjoying a few luxuries, such as the “big-ass trucks” Gallego talks about.
“Democrats have spent a lot of time talking about the struggles people face, and that may serve them well in this election,” Pierce wrote in an email. “But the long-term opportunity for people like Gallego who may have aspirations to lead the party forward is to articulate a compelling vision for what a better economic future could look like and how we get there.”
Near the end of the speech, Gallego got personal. When he was a kid, he said, he spent “many years” in Chihuahua, the Mexican state just over the border, and he often came back to the U.S. through their city.
“I remember many times crossing the border with my family. It always had this special meaning to me, that I was in a safe space, that I had a future. And the last time that I crossed the border, to move permanently back to the States, I remember seeing it with my primos, looking out at the desert sky, seeing what an amazing place this was.
“My first version of America was always El Paso.”
Not everyone was moved. An older man accused Gallego of pandering, and others who liked the story still couldn’t remember his name. Andres Berrios, a 19-year-old mariachi, said he missed the moment because he got up in the middle of the speech to get a Dr Pepper.
But several people who’d never heard of him an hour ago found it endearing.
“It was heartfelt,” said Angela Camacho, a 34-year-old teacher.
“He got me,” said Corina Martinez, 39, holding her fist to her heart.
* * *
On a tour bus south of Miami, Gallego sat across from Democratic candidate Eliott Rodriguez.
Rodriguez, a former TV journalist, was in a tough battle for Florida’s 27th Congressional District. His Republican opponent, Rep. María Elvira Salazar, had money and history on her side; the district had only elected one Democrat since 2012. But Cook Political Report had declared the race “clearly competitive.”
“What’s been the biggest surprise?” Gallego asked the first-time candidate.
“Dealing with different personalities on the campaign,” Rodriguez said. “But I’ve been able to manage that.”
And then Rodriguez started telling Gallego his family’s immigration story, which ran through Cuba, rather than El Paso, but hit similar notes.
As Gallego listened, it was easy to see how he developed rapport with downballot candidates and the power brokers around them.
The groundwork did not always translate to attention on the internet. Local media coverage of Gallego’s tour was thin outside of El Paso, and when his PR team posted a handful of highlight reels and influencer-coded videos on social media, nearly all hit modest, four-figure view counts. A few early X posts were overwhelmed by users linking him to Swalwell. The most engagement Gallego got on the tour was on unrelated posts criticizing Trump and Republicans.
Any Democratic candidate for president, Gallego believes, would need to win at least 62% of the Latino vote. In 2024, Kamala Harris got 56%, down 10 percentage points from Joe Biden in 2020. Among Latino men, Trump pulled off a stunning 35-point swing.
After the midterms, Gallego said, he would measure the success of his trip by numbers. Did his candidates win? Did they turn out more Latinos than expected? Or, more specifically, did they get a higher share of the votes from Latino men?
“That’s the area that I think really matters,” he said, “to basically prove a lot of our thesis, which is: You can get these voters back, but you have to kind of focus on the things that actually matter to them.”
Standing in a parking lot outside a polling place in Miami, admiring Rodriguez’s catchy campaign song, Gallego insisted the mission was bigger than his potential bid for the White House.
“We can’t win nationally without Latinos,” he said. “There’s just no other way. The math doesn’t math. It’s our responsibility [to reach them], because we want to make sure the country does well. ... We have to help, whether I’m running or not.”
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