Democratic Arizona Senator-elect Ruben Gallego said Sunday on CNN that his party had ignored Latino voters, calling out how “Ivy League” candidates lacked a “pulse” on the Latino working class.
Following President-elect Donald Trump’s win, exit polls from the election showed that the Republican candidate made significant gains among key Democratic voting blocs, such as Hispanic and black men. On “State of the Union,” host Jake Tapper questioned the newly elected Arizona senator about the GOP’s swing among Hispanics, pointing out that Gallego previously told Democrats to “go touch grass and meet real Latinos.”
“I think Democrats, a lot of times, surround ourselves with people that will affirm what we already believe or people from our same backgrounds, right? And so you have a lot of Ivy League candidates that hire Ivy League Latinos that don’t actually come from a working class background, and most Latinos are actually working class,” Gallego said. “Sometimes we don’t want to hear what they’re saying.”
“I had the benefit of growing up in a working class family … I actually have a really good pulse in what’s happening there. We don’t want to hear the bad news. I think a lot of times, we knew that something was bad with the Latino community when it comes to their opinion of the economy, because I’m very much connected to it. I think a lot of politicians didn’t want to hear what was actually happening out there,” Gallego added.
Gallego went on to explain how his campaign in the red state was successful because he understood that Latino voters were concerned with both the economy and the border, noting that lawmakers in Washington, D.C. didn’t want to listen to this group.
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“The reason we were successful, because we heard about it and we moved early on it. My first campaign commercial was about the economy in Spanish and also on the border. Our first commercial was about immigration and more border security in Spanish, because we heard about it earlier. I think there’s a lot of people in D.C. that didn’t want to hear what was happening out there because it would go against some of the stuff they had learned in the past.”
Data from Reuters’ exit polls show that while Trump did not lead among either Latino or Black voters overall compared to Vice President Kamala Harris, he did gain 14 points with Hispanics nationwide and one point with black voters. Specifically, Trump made significant gains among men in these once-key Democratic voting blocs, receiving 21% of black men — a 2-point increase from the 2020 election — and 55% of Hispanic men, a 19-point jump from 2020.
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